Angela’s Ashes is the biography of a man’s poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland told in the present tense, and is written to reflect a child’s perspective on life. Frank McCourt undergoes starvation and severe neglect throughout his younger years. His father, Malachy McCourt, causes most of Frank’s suffering. Malachy drinks away the family’s money and exhausts Frank with his erratic and neglectful behavior. At the same time, Frank’s father is occasionally kind, and develops the boy’s love of language and imagination by telling him stories about Irish folklore at night. To rationalize this mixed personality, Frank applies childlike logic to his problems and divides his father into “good” and “bad” personas that are more understandable than moral ambiguity. The culture of the Catholic Church he grows up in is strongly binary, dividing all things along sometimes arbitrary lines of sinfulness and piety and leaving no middle ground. From that culture, it is reasonable that Frank would believe “my father is like the Holy Trinity with 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). 

This cannot be true. A personality cannot be separated from its totality into good and bad sections. Malachy is imaginative and cares to some extent for his family, yet his selfishness, impulsivity, and tendency to drink make him neglect his role as a parent. All of these aspects are contained in one man, and need not be separate. He enchants his children with tales of the mythic Irish hero Cuchulain, and when baby Margaret is born to the family he spends day and night playing with her. But when it comes to working, he avoids it and does not support his family. Throughout the novel, he takes on jobs and loses them after a few weeks due to drinking, leaving his family in constant financial ruin. The clearest example of his impulsivity and his struggle to work comes when he goes to England for a job, promising to send money home. His travel agent assures him that he can be a “Rockefeller” if he simply works hard at any of the plentiful jobs there, but he passes up this clear opportunity and soon “squanders his money in pubs all over Coventry” (McCourt 218, 230). While home, he refuses to face the anger of his family by running away to the pub when they try to address his alcoholism. At one point, he heads to the pub on the day of his son’s christening, and when confronted can only squirm with discomfort: “[He] looked from one to the other, shifted on his feet, pulled his cap down over his eyes” and headed to the pub (McCourt 18). The cap especially is a sign of shame. He tries to hide his body from view to evade his guilt, but it only shows that he knows his actions are wrong, and yet still refuses the advice of his family. At one point, he goes to the IRA for financial support. When the officer there kindly gives him an advance sum for the bus ride home, he can only think of drinking and impulsively asks for more money for a pint, causing the IRA to shut their doors to the family (McCourt 52). He is too focused on his own needs and struggles to act in socially appropriate ways. He also neglects his children in favor of a days-long cigarette run, and the children begin to “stink to high heaven” while they develop “raw sore skin” (McCourt 39). Malachy fails to consider the needs of others, valuing his own pleasure over the very health of his children. At all times, he chooses the easy option. It is easy to be sweet to a baby and tell stories to children, but it is hard to work long hours, bathe dirty children, and save money.

To add nuance, it’s certain that Malachy faces mental illness and suffers emotionally. As a child, he was dropped on his head. Children who suffer from traumatic brain injuries can suffer from behavioral and cognitive problems that are permanent, explaining some of Malachy’s strange behavior (Badr et al.). He has also grown up in a society with inflexible gender roles that assert men cannot cry or show emotion, all while bearing the full financial and occupational weight of the family. Frank is aware of these gender norms and suffers under them too, realizing in the hospital that if he cries due to pain, the nurses will say “What’s this, what’s this, be a man… Offer it up, think of the sufferings of Our Lord on the cross” (McCourt 230). In this emotionally strangled culture, it makes sense that men would numb themselves and turn to drinking at one of the countless pubs. Malachy is highly imaginative and a sensitive soul. He is moved by patriotism and folklore, and cares deeply for his children. At the risk of turning to Stephen King’s Hemingway Defense mentioned in On Writing, being a sensitive person in such a stoic culture is likely difficult and isolating, and drinking could be an effective (though unhealthy) coping mechanism. On top of his struggle, he has no access to therapy or compassion from others. They only hurl harsh insults like “disgusting specimen” and “disgrace” that lower his self-esteem and motivation (McCourt 18, 111). Frank’s measured portrayal of his father allows readers to interrogate their biases about alcoholism and addiction, recognizing that alcoholism is not a mental illness that stems completely from character, but is also influenced by neurobiology and culture.

Frank is able to write about his father in a measured way, despite the lifetime of neglect he endured. He is not without bitterness, and often levies criticisms at his father through his Mom's dialogue. She critiques his drinking problem and his selfishness, asking “if he’ll be home with his wages or… drink everything again” and telling him that “sitting on your arse by the fire is no place for a man” (McCourt 25). Yet Frank is still able to bring his father’s positive qualities to light, like his caring heart and big imagination. He describes his love for his father’s stories of Irish myths and imagined animals, and he’s able to notice the good parts of his father through the trinity metaphor as the part “with the stories and prayers” (McCourt 210). I think that Frank’s wisdom and empathy allow him to write about his father in a balanced tone. He is observant and has a knack for understanding the motivations of others, whether religious or cultural. This talent extends even to his neglectful father, and shows an enormous capacity for compassion and forgiveness. 

Malachy has a complex impact on Frank, as he is the source of both motivation to succeed and trauma that disturbs Frank’s development. Frank is inspired by Malachy’s laziness to work hard and provide for his family, giving him the motivation to save for a trip to America and work a dangerous coal-lifting job. As he matures, Frank notices his father’s flaws and is determined to avoid following in his footsteps. As young as four years old, he realizes that his father is not supporting the family and after noting the emotional distress it causes his mother, he decides “I’ll be a man soon and I’ll get a job in the place with the big gate and I’ll come home every Friday night with money for eggs” (McCourt 28). This motivation inspires him to write letters for a local businesswoman and work long hours as a postal delivery boy. He hopes to become the opposite of his father and is pushed towards excellence and success by this drive. However, the trauma of childhood does impact Frank somewhat as well. The first time he drinks, he overdoes it just like his father did, a sign that he is mentally struggling. The pain of being the sole provider for his family in his teens is a great and stressful one. Yet he manages to persevere.

The hopeful ending of the novel shows that Frank believes he has not been held back by his traumatic past. The novel ends in America as Frank admires the beautiful and promising New York City skyline, and he is distanced from Malachy both mentally and geographically. The author believes that his father was ultimately irrelevant, as Frank is able to shape his own destiny and escape the cycle of poverty that his father had been trapped in. Despite all that he has faced from Malachy and the stifling cultural norms of his homeland, he is able to triumph.

Works Cited 

Badr, Lina Kurdahi, et al. “Intervention for Infants with Brain Injury: Results of a Randomized Controlled Study.” Infant Behavior & Development, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Jan. 2006, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2700252/. 

McCourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes. Scribner, 2009