Responce on Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes

Essay by aquaedenHigh School, 11th grade January 2005

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Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes is a powerful, stunning and emotional memoir of his life starting from childhood to adulthood. This book has a unique way on the narrator technique which is using young Frank's 'innocent eye' to tell the story. This allows the reader to experience his own life in a transparent way and able to witness how Frank grow from a innocent child to a complex adult. His writing can be easily identified between the age of four, eleven, and fourteen.

When describing his experience at the age of four, the tone is very much like a story told from a child's pure perspective. Simple dialogue and approaches can be found in the book during this time period: "We're on the seesaw. Up, down, updown. Malachy goes up. I get off. Malachy goes down. Seesaw hits ground." At this point, only fragment sentence structures were demonstrated. McCount presents information as if heard and interpreted by a child.

For instance, a kind neighbour of his, Mrs. Leibowitz, says, "Nice Chewish, have eh?" We all know that the word "Chewish" is supposed to be spelled like "Jewish"; over here the spelling is spelled as it is heard and that is usual common for children's interpretations. Not only simple dialogue is used throughout the book, so are simple thoughts. Children tend to change subjects quickly in a conversation; for example: "They have their tea...uncle Pa Keating, who is my uncle because he's married to my aunt Aggie, picks up Eugene." The reader knows Pa Keating is the children's uncle; children often repeat needless information into a conversation, McCourt did the same thing on this section on the book. He also slows down the reader with examples like 'a blackness come over me' for describing his anger. This shows his thoughts...