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Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
A Look at Irish Culture during the Depression Era
Frank Mc Court, the author of Angela’s Ashes, was born during the Great Depression. A few years after immigrating to the United States because their families believed they would find their fortune here, his Irish family moved back to Ireland in hopes of a better life. They were met with only more hardships in their native country. His book shows the struggle and small joys of daily life with siblings, school friends, and the adults in his life. It also provides much insight into the way the people in Ireland lived at that time. The author tells the story from the viewpoint of Frank, the oldest child of a father whose background in "the North" (having been involved with the IRA) causes continual suspicion. His mother, Angela, had never known her father and her own mother is very miserly and offers no help to the woman and her children.
Through the course of telling about his own life and his family’s hard times, McCourt touches upon the fighting that went on between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and the toll this had on the Irish people. He also delved deeply into the issue of poverty among the Irish and the many ways they dealt with the hardship in their lives.
Life in the Irish city of Limerick is so hard that starvation is a way of life for most of the residents "Consumption," pneumonia, and typhoid are rampant; children go to school barefoot or in pie...
Evan King Mrs. Madis English 12-2 14 January 2015 Making Something Out Of Nothing Making the most out of life is hard, especially life as a poor child in Ireland would have kept most people from reaching their goals in life but not for Frank McCourt, did not play into the stereotypes of many poor Irish people of that time. In the Memoir Angela’s Ashes written by Frank McCourt Frank has to persevere through much adversity in his not so desirable life as a poor Irish boy with a drunk for a father who could not provide for Frank and his family. Frank must get a job at a young age in order to bring in the money that his father Malachy drinks away, when he finally has money and moves to America, and when he eventually becomes a teacher even with all of his bad experiences as a child in school.
The first barrier to a better life had to do with surviving poverty or the absence of certain privileges. In Angela’s Ashes, Frank, the protagonist of the book, along with his family had to endure persistent rains, exposure to disease and starvation. Frank and Malachy Jr. had to resort to stealing food several ...
Frank McCourt was born in depression-era Brooklyn and remained there until the age of four when he left with his family to his native country, Ireland. He came face too face with many hardships but managed to make it back to New York city at age nineteen. Upon his arrival Frank worked as a high school English teacher for forty-five years. After retiring from teaching, Frank, along with his brother, Malachy, performed a two man show called “A couple of Blaguards.” Frank won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela’s Ashes in 1997.
Included within the anthology The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction,1[1] are the works of great Irish authors written from around three hundred years ago, until as recently as the last decade. Since one might expect to find in an anthology such as this only expressions and interpretations of Irish or European places, events or peoples, some included material could be quite surprising in its contrasting content. One such inclusion comes from the novel Black Robe,2[2] by Irish-born author Brian Moore. Leaving Ireland as a young man afforded Moore a chance to see a great deal of the world and in reflection afforded him a great diversity of setting and theme in his writings. And while his Black Robe may express little of Ireland itself, it expresses much of Moore in his exploration into evolving concepts of morality, faith, righteousness and the ever-changing human heart.
Growing up in Limerick, in his memoir Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt describes the continuing difficulties The McCourt’s face in 1930’s with World War II going into motion after in the early 1940s. Frankie goes through many changes as he progresses through his childhood. He is enrolled in Catholic school, with many rigorous Headmasters with a seemingly sole purpose of belittling the students. To get ready for confirmation Frank is forced to join the Confraternity, a brotherhood group that all the boys must join in preparation for confirmation. Frank becomes friends with Paddy clohessy and they get into many forms of mischief for a time. Through his younger years he falls ill of serious illnesses that complicates things
Angela’s Ashes - Frank McCourt's Love/Hate Relationship with his Father. Angela’s Ashes is a memoir of Frank McCourt’s childhood and the difficulties he faced whilst growing up. His family were very poor and moved from America to Limerick to try and live an easier life. Frank’s father was constantly out of a job and never had enough money to support his family and friends.
Meagher, Timothy. “The Columbia Guide to Irish American History.” Columbia University Press- New York, 2005
The Theme of Religion in Angela’s Ashes Throughout the novel, religion is presented as being of extreme importance in Irish society, influencing the beliefs and actions of the characters. I will attempt to highlight the several factors which I believe make up the presentation of religion in “Angela’s Ashes”. From the beginning of the book, religion is said to make up a large part of the unhappy childhood Frank suffered. The following quote shows the extent of Frank’s sentiments: “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood, is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood” The quote above portrays the crescendo of negative emotion, describing the worse possible scenario of a childhood, adding finally “Catholic” to signify the most terrible part of the childhood Frank suffered.
There is particular consideration given to the political climate in this story. It is incorporated with social and ethnic concerns that are prevalent. The story also addresses prejudice and the theme of ethnic stereotyping through his character development. O'Connor does not present a work that is riddled with Irish slurs or ethnic approximations. Instead, he attempts to provide an account that is both informative and accurate.
On a cool winter's night, a large cloud slowly drifts past the looming moon, creating an ash-grey sky that sets off an eerie mood. A father sits in his car patiently awaiting for his daughter to bring out 200 dollars that could save him from a little financial mishap, but doesn’t. She quietly sits by a nearby window and waits for him to leave. In the short story “Ashes” by Susan Beth Pfeffer, the main character Ashleigh lives with her divorced mother and frequently sees her father on Mondays and Wednesdays, during the story Ashleigh's dad mensions a financial problems and wants Ashleigh to barrow “steel” 200 dollars from her mother's savings and give it to her father whose fate lies with in the money to pull him out of financial trouble.
Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to recent Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland because of poor prospects in America. Due to the Great Depression, Malachy could not find work in America. However, things did not get any better back in Ireland for Malachy. A chronically unemployed and nearly unemployable alcoholic, he appears to be the model on which many of our more insulting cliches about drunken Irish manhood are based. Week after week, Angela would be home expecting her husband to come home with money to eat, but Malachy always spent his wages on pints at local pubs. Frank’s father would come home late at night and make his sons get out of bed and sing patriotic songs about Ireland by Roddy McCorley and Kevin Barry, who were hung for their country. Frank loved his father and got an empty feeling in his heart when he knew his father was out of work again. Frank described his father as the Holy Trinity because there is three people in him, “The one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland” (McCourt 210). Even when there was a war going on and English agents were recruiting Irishmen to work in their munitions factories, Malachy could not keep a job when he traveled to England.
he memoir of Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes starts before Frank is born the reader knows he had help of some kind composing the beginning. Frank may have traveled back to Ireland when he began writing or consulted his mother before she passed and before he began to write. McCourt never explicitly says how he gathered his knowledge about before he was born and before he was of the age to remember things in detail. There are many possibilities as to how McCourt formed his memoir, whether it be his imagination, logical knowledge, or word of mouth; with the help of his editors he constructed a great piece of literary work.
A collection of short stories published in 1907, Dubliners, by James Joyce, revolves around the everyday lives of ordinary citizens in Dublin, Ireland (Freidrich 166). According to Joyce himself, his intention was to "write a chapter of the moral history of [his] country and [he] chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to [b]e the centre of paralysis" (Friedrich 166). True to his goal, each of the fifteen stories are tales of disappointment, darkness, captivity, frustration, and flaw. The book is divided into four sections: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life (Levin 159). The structure of the book shows that gradually, citizens become trapped in Dublin society (Stone 140). The stories portray Joyce's feeling that Dublin is the epitome of paralysis and all of the citizens are victims (Levin 159). Although each story from Dubliners is a unique and separate depiction, they all have similarities with each other. In addition, because the first three stories -- The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby parallel each other in many ways, they can be seen as a set in and of themselves. The purpose of this essay is to explore one particular similarity in order to prove that the childhood stories can be seen as specific section of Dubliners. By examining the characters of Father Flynn in The Sisters, Father Butler in An Encounter, and Mangan's sister in Araby, I will demonstrate that the idea of being held captive by religion is felt by the protagonist of each story. In this paper, I argue that because religion played such a significant role in the lives of the middle class, it was something that many citizens felt was suffocating and from which it was impossible to get away. Each of the three childhood stories uses religion to keep the protagonist captive. In The Sisters, Father Flynn plays an important role in making the narrator feel like a prisoner. Mr. Cotter's comment that "… a young lad [should] run about and play with young lads of his own age…" suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. Even in death, the boy can not free himself from the presence of Father Flynn (Stone 169) as is illustrated in the following passage: "But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something.
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable child hood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood Is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood", writes Frank McCourt of his early life. Although Frank McCourt's autobiography, Angela's Ashes, paints a picture of both terrible poverty and struggles, this text is appealing and up lifting because of its focus on both humor and hope. McCourt's text shows the determination people living in dreadful conditions must have in order to rise above their situations and make better lives for themselves and their families. The effect of the story, although often distressing and sad, is not depressing. Frank as the young narrator describes his life events without bitterness, anger, or blame. Poverty and hardship are treated simply as if they are a fact of life, and in spite of the hard circumstances, many episodes during the novel are hilarious.
Ireland is described as, “Poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long year” (9). The family lived in poor and life threatening conditions. Eleven families shared one lavatory which was closest to the McCourt family door. The lavatory is never cleaned and can kill them from all the diseases (112-113). Although the conditions were bad they couldn’t move it was the cheapest and most affordable place they could find for six shillings a week.