Angela’s Ashes: Style 1 key example

McCourt’s narrative voice is deliberately childish and simplistic, reminding readers that for most of the book he’s a little boy who is too young to understand all the difficulties his family faces. This voice includes the West of Ireland dialect and colloquial Limerick language that McCourt gets from his Limerick upbringing, incorporating idioms and slang that reflect the history and preoccupations of his community. The realistic use of dialect and local language locates McCourt’s experiences in a specific cultural context. Through it, the author invites readers to “hear” how a Limerick child might really have sounded, and how his parents and friends sounded to him.

McCourt’s pacing varies throughout the narrative, just as a child's memories might prioritize some things over others and spend more time ruminating on them. More importance, and therefore more of the memoir's pages, goes to important or emotional anecdotes than to purely transactional or otherwise mundane encounters. Indeed, the author devotes entire pages to moments that loom large in his memory, while he covers longer spans of time (years, at one point) in only a few sentences. This shifting pace points to the uneven ways in which memories form. Some events that take only minutes feel endless for little Frank, while entire years blur together. By focusing on some days with excruciating detail and skipping over others, McCourt makes the reader feel the influence of his own limited perspective.

Angela's Ashes is undeniably a sad novel, but is also very funny in places. McCourt’s style blends sadness with humor and irony in a way that is now considered characteristic of his writing. The memoir swings between grief and laughter, often using similes and period-specific idioms in both difficult or funny situations. Although the humor of Angela’s Ashes is always grim, a joke is rarely far away from even the most intense moment of grief or despair.