Individuality In Angela's Ashes
The Predicament of Individuality in Angela’s Ashes
From: Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies | Date: September 22, 2002 | Author: Levy, Eric P.
Since publication in 1996, Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt, has already elicited substantial critical response. Brief notice of three such evaluations will indicate the range of reception. Peter Lenz approaches the memoir in terms of relevant motifs in the Irish literary tradition, with particular emphasis on 'the macabre, the grotesque, the tragicomical, [and]...the theme of the exile'. (1) He also investigates the 'resemblance' of narrative technique in McCourt's memoir 'to the Irish Oral Tradition and to how the seanchai, the oral story-teller, tried to drag the listener in to make him part …show more content…
As Mr McCaffrey of Eason's Ltd tells Frank McCourt, who has endured this poverty for the first sixteen years of his life: 'You live in a lane and that means you have nowhere to go but up' (p. 334). Yet, though poverty, in Angela's Ashes, does indeed oppress with debasing circumstances, it alone does not erase individuality, which survives the most excessive hardship: 'there's a pile of rags in a corner the pile is saying who it is and you say telegram...' (p. 316). The greatest threats to individuality in Limerick, the city where Frank, after removal from America with his family at the age of four, undergoes a 'miserable Irish Catholic childhood', stem from attitudes and practices proper to the ambient ethos, which functions as a pervasive thought-regime or normative system, stifling discrepant perspectives that nevertheless per sist alongside and within it. Examining the interpenetration of these elements deepens understanding of Frank's predicament, and illumines the implications of his eventual emergence from
From: Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies | Date: September 22, 2002 | Author: Levy, Eric P.
Since publication in 1996, Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt, has already elicited substantial critical response. Brief notice of three such evaluations will indicate the range of reception. Peter Lenz approaches the memoir in terms of relevant motifs in the Irish literary tradition, with particular emphasis on 'the macabre, the grotesque, the tragicomical, [and]...the theme of the exile'. (1) He also investigates the 'resemblance' of narrative technique in McCourt's memoir 'to the Irish Oral Tradition and to how the seanchai, the oral story-teller, tried to drag the listener in to make him part …show more content…
As Mr McCaffrey of Eason's Ltd tells Frank McCourt, who has endured this poverty for the first sixteen years of his life: 'You live in a lane and that means you have nowhere to go but up' (p. 334). Yet, though poverty, in Angela's Ashes, does indeed oppress with debasing circumstances, it alone does not erase individuality, which survives the most excessive hardship: 'there's a pile of rags in a corner the pile is saying who it is and you say telegram...' (p. 316). The greatest threats to individuality in Limerick, the city where Frank, after removal from America with his family at the age of four, undergoes a 'miserable Irish Catholic childhood', stem from attitudes and practices proper to the ambient ethos, which functions as a pervasive thought-regime or normative system, stifling discrepant perspectives that nevertheless per sist alongside and within it. Examining the interpenetration of these elements deepens understanding of Frank's predicament, and illumines the implications of his eventual emergence from