Angela's Ashes Analysis

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Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes sheds light on Limerick during the 1930’s and 1940’s in all its filthiness and destitution. McCourt shows not just the predicament of Limerick during this time, but also his own predicament of an alcoholic father who spends as the family’s money on pints at pubs. McCourt displays his young life in Limerick with various forms of descriptive writing that is not seen in other memoirs as it shows ever-changing kinds of tone throughout the memoir. McCourt changed his writing to make the reader feel as though his younger self wrote the text that was being read. For example, when Frank was in his adolescence and commented “Malachy has dog blood and the dog has Malachy blood” after witnessing a bleeding dog when he accidently made Malachy Jr. bite through his tongue (McCourt 20). McCourt gives simple bleak ideas in his childhood as a child would and then introduces heavier descriptive ideas…show more content…
Patricia recites part of a poem to him called “ The Highwayman” which, with his few lines of Shakespeare, kicks off his liking of poetry. When Patricia dies, he is more disturbed by her not telling him the end of “The Highwayman” than her death. Some might wonder as to why he put emphasis on something that seems so callous on the surface, yet it shows a stunning truth that he has been subject to so much more death in his life at that point, than he has poetry. So for Frank, the poetry is vastly more moving than even death. Another event that changed the tone of the writing was when Frank found Malachy Sr. spending the money for the new baby on pints of alcohol at a local bar and has the urge to run into the bar and kick his father in the leg, but at the same time wants the stories and sitting by the fire with his father to

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