Angela's Ashes Response

    Frank McCourt writes about his childhood and experiences growing up in Ireland with his improvised family in his personal memoir, Angela's Ashes. In the excerpt I read it seemed as if the McCourt family, although poor and struggling to survive, made do with what they had while Frank and his brother tried to live a normal life.

      One descriptive paragraph explains a comical time when his father tried to use a jam jar to hang a photo ultimately getting blobs of blood on it. McCourt uses some foreshadowing here as he recalls his mother telling his father he's "talking a lot of bloody none sense" where afterwards he gets blood all over the picture. Another section of the story that shows off McCourts descriptive style is when he tells of how he had to carry a pigs head through the streets to his home. In that section he vividly describes his endeavors with this pig and reading about him waking through the town being heckled, evokes your sympathy for this kid and gives you the sense of second hand embarrassment he endured. The school boys call out, " [Do] you know the only part of the pig the McCourts don't ate?[...] The only part they don't ate is the oink."


    Besides from using humor based stories to retell his past, McCourt also uses some literary elements that categorizes this piece as both creative and non-fiction. There are experimental aspects in this piece that are not typical to the ordinary novel. The dialogue between the characters unconventional as they are told on narrative style instead of split dialogue. There are also song lyrics through out different sections of the piece, from little girls singing to his fathers singing.

"Heads erect, eyes to front, stepping proudly together, / Sure freedom sits thrones on each proud     spirit there." 

These two lines from one of his fathers song really embodied who he thought his father was and how exactly he wanted to portray his character in the novel. He constantly spoke of his father as having a lot of pride for a poor man.

     Although this family was in terrible living conditions with little food and no access to luxuries, McCourt does not portray the story of his boyhood in a melodramatic way. He uses comical phrases and cheerful anecdotes that make light of a hard situation. While reading you get a sense of who the author really was a child. He chose to make the focus of this memoir the world through the eyes of a naive child who knew nothing other than the life he lived. Because the story is told being told through a young boy the language used is simple but still powerful in its description, which works for this type of memoir. The tone of the writing, written in laymans tone, gives the reader more of a sense of how life was in Ireland at that time. There is little education, so most of the references is to biblical figures and the area is cold and worn, so the lack of enchantment is embodied in McCourts simplistic words. I think the novel was so successful because it transported people back in time, placing them next to this little boy as he tells his story.