Frank Mccourt's Angelas Ashes

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William Faulkner believes that a writer is given the privilege and duty of reminding the reader “of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.” What Faulkner means is that an author must present the “thruths of his heart,” spiritual truths which include “agony” and “compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” If an author cannot carry out this duty there is no need for writing at all. Frank McCourt honors this duty as a writer throughout his memoir, Angela’s Ashes when he sees his “miserable Irish childhood” as a blessing, a life that allowed him to become an empathetic person. In order to be successful and inadvertently accomplish the writer’s duty, McCourt embraces the hardships of his …show more content…
Angela’s Ashes is the prime example of an author achieving William Faulkner’s writer’s duty as Frank McCourt recounts his childhood of agony, and accepts that this suffering made him empathetic and his writing relatable. Angela’s Ashes is the memoir of a man, Frank McCourt, who embraces his childhood full of agony and impoverishment. McCourt begins his memoir with brutally truthful stories of his childhood; including every dreadful detail to re-familiarize himself with the difficulties he faced. He realizes that every part of his childhood must be included in order for him to be truthful to himself, and in return he achieved the writer’s duty and created a sense of empathy within himself. A scene in which McCourt has empathy for his child self is in chapter four of Angela’s Ashes, when he as a child is preparing for his “First Confession and First Communion” and begins to ponder death (113). At this point in McCourt’s childhood, he has experienced more death than any child should, and has begun to see it as a normality. This is expressed when he “wonder[s] if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live,” referring to his family. This is a thought that is surreally real, as it
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