The Mother and the Father Figures in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes

Angelas Ashes is the bleak, humorous and very compelling memoir of the occasions childhood in Limerick, Ireland, during the Great Depression. The book is, at the corresponding(p) time, a historical account, a work of fiction and an autobiography. First and maiden however, Angelas Ashes is a personal narrative that evokes the struggles of an individual growing up in adverse and dire conditions. The narrative focuses directly on the actors childhood and adolescence, a time when the individual is much to a greater extent prone to vulnerability and powerlessness.The story is so appealing to the reader barely because it is filtered through the eyes of a child who is directly exposed to the yell of social, economical and policy-making forces that surpass his comprehension. Thus, the narrative functions as a deconstruction of the innocent and paradisiacal childhood. The child experiences the most crushed forms of physical misery, ache and illness as well as the permanent feeling o f wickedness and depression of being a burden to his own fuss.The mother-son relationship describe in the book is one of the most effective threads of the narrative, as it represents the way in which amor matris can be modified and received other than under the strain of very hard social circumstances. The most lucid form of abuse for the helpless child hero is the social and political context he is entrapped in. In 1935, Franks family flees Brooklyn because of the general exiguity and deterioration that had spread in the United States during the Great Depression.After this antonym emigration to their homeland however, the family discovers an even grimmer and more than disheartening poverty. In this context, the blueprint of a careless and drunken father and that of a defeated and abject mother are very potent realities for the child. Both of the parents are extremely powerful influences for the child and both of them function as ambivalent figures. Malachy, the father, who i s conjectural to allow support and stability to the poverty stricken family, is unreli fitting because of his softness to hold any job and because of his alcohol addiction.The fact that he totally deserts the family after leaving for England to find work is an addition to the disconfirming influence he exerts. Frank and his brothers have to suffer because the father fails to offer them even minimal protection from the dire social realities of the day. At the comparable time however, he is also the one who tells his children the first folktales of Irish heroes, procuring them a slight comfort amidst the dire conditions of life and feeding their imagination and their hopes.The mother figure is also ambivalent. Frank both recognises her and loathes her at the same time. He is moved by her devotion to her children and by her motherly love provided he is also repulsed at times when he sees the contemptible and humbling condition she brings herself to in order to save her family from starvation. Frank encounters his mother by the bye when she is begging in the streets to get the remains of the priests dinner and is shocked by her condition.Later on, when the family has to find shelter with a cousin named Laman Griffin, the child is once more appalled when he discovers the sexual nature of the relationship that his mother has with Laman. These loaded and horrendous compromises that the mother has to make in order to be able to sustain her family inspire Frank with a permanent feeling of ungodliness at being he himself one of the objects of her sacrifice. The mother-son relationship is therefore label by this need of an exaggerated proof of devotion and motherly love on the part of the mother.Angela is therefore a perfect instance of a mothers powerful love for her children, and Frank McCourt points this out in his narrative in various ways. Given the circumstances of the family however, their relationship is more complex than that. The child is discomfit ed by the guilt of feeling as a burden to his mother, instead of being comforted by the vehemence of a mothers protective care. In the context of his tragic childhood, Frank feels even more poignantly the influence of his parents failures and qualities, at the same time.