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Since I have finished reading Angela s Ashes,
honestly I thought about what Frank McCourt had been through in his childhood.
His life seemed cruel to me. I felt sorry for him to have been born into his family.
The book shows that because of his alcoholic father and his lazy mother, he had a really hard time, often suffering from starvation due to lack of family money during his childhood.
His father, whose name is Malachy McCourt, is the laziest person I have ever seen.
He doesn’t have a job to earn money. What he does is to get the dole and then spend all the money for a pint. He doesn’t keep the dole for his starving children and his wife, Angela.
Because of McCourt s alcoholic dad, I think that alcoholism has the most important role in this story, and I want to research this issue.
Nowadays, alcoholism is technically treated as a disease,
not one of bad behavior or character as we see. Although a little bit of alcohol is
good for a person’s health, overuse of alcohol signals a chronic disease, alcoholism and
could cause child abuse. Needless to say, alcohol is addictive like other drugs such as nicotine, heroin, and cocaine. Once people become alcoholic, it is difficult for them to stop drinking liquor. These alcoholic people may drink excessively on a regular basis and suffer social,
occupational, and health problems (Hochenbury 168).
Malachy is undoubtedly an alcoholic.
Every night he told his family that he would take a walk.
Eventually he came back with smell of liquor on him.
Generally, it takes about one hour to metabolize the alcohol in one drink.
After metabolism, we lose cognitive abilities, such as concentration, memory, and speech,
and physical abilities, such as muscle coordination and balance (168).
These are the reasons why drunken people sometimes talk very funny, or the sentences,
which they speak, completely don’t make sense. There are several examples, in this story which illustrate that Malachy Sr. goes out to drink and he comes back to his house,
"When Margaret died, he told his family that he was going out for cigarettes hunt.
Two days later, he returned from cigarettes hunt. But he had a smell of the drink on him" (McCourt 45).
Usually, alcohol produces a mild euphoria, talkativeness,
and feelings of good humor and friendliness. Alcohol is classified as a depressant.
This happens because the alcohol lessens inhibitions by depressing the center of the brain (168). Because of the alcohol, "whenever Malachy Sr. came back home with smell of liquor,
he sang a song happily and desperately on the way home"(McCourt 136).
Those many episodes from the book show how the alcohol replaced his sad feelings with jovial feelings.
In his situation, at the time of his lovely daughter s death, Malachy Sr. couldn’t stop going out for drink to lessen his sorrowful feelings.
I think that he really struggled not to cry for his lovely daughter because of his rigid North-Ireland pride. I would say that he might think that his laziness caused her death.
I assume that this is the reason why he started drinking again.
Though he had stopped drinking since her birth, he began to drink again right after her death to forget or run away from his disconsolate feelings.
I am 21 years old. In the future I might have children and a wife.
When I have a family, I will try not to drink too much like Malachy.
I don’t want to destroy my future family like he did.
Though I suggested that this book was boring to me when I read this book as his diary in his childhood, it was a good example for me, who had never had contact with alcoholic people,
to realize and consider how alcohol affects and influences family members.
In the world, there are a lot of people addicted to alcohol.
Angela s Ashes is based on a true story, so I assume there are a lot of children,
in similar situations like Frank McCourt was in.
I wish all people had nice families and good relationships with each other.
Works Cited
Hockenbury, Don H. and Hockenbury, Sandra E. Psychology Second Edition.
New York. Worth Publishers, Catherine Woods.
McCourt, Frank. Angela s Ashes: a memoir. New York: New York Touchstone, 1999.
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