Angela's Ashes UPDATED Questions and
CORRECT Answers
Plot Overview - CORRECT ANSWER✔✔- The narrator, Frank McCourt, describes how his
parents meet in Brooklyn, New York. After his mother, Angela, becomes pregnant with
Frank, she marries Malachy, the father of her child. Angela struggles to feed her growing
family of sons, while Malachy spends his wages on alcohol. Frank's much-loved baby sister,
Margaret, dies and Angela falls into depression. The McCourts decide to return to Ireland.
More troubles plague the McCourts in Ireland: Angela has a miscarriage, Frank's two
younger brothers die, and Malachy continues to drink away the family's money.
Frank's childhood is described as a time of great deprivation, but of good humor and
adventure as well. When the first floor of the house floods during the winter, Angela and
Malachy announce that the family will leave the cold damp of the first floor, which they call
"Ireland," and move to the warm, cozy second floor, which they call "Italy." Although
Malachy's alcoholism uses up all of the money for food, he earns Frank's love and affection
by entertaining him with stories about Irish heroes and the people who live on their lane.
Over the course of a few years, Angela gives birth to two sons, Michael and Alphonsus.
Alphosus is called "Alphie" for short. As Frank grows older, the narration increasingly
focuses on his exploits at school. When Frank turns ten, he is confirmed (Confirmation is a
ritual that makes one an official Christian or Catholic. When Frank was growing up, people
were confirmed around ages seven to ten). Right after his confirmation, Frank falls ill with
typhoid fever and must stay in the hospital for months. There, he gets his first introduction to
Shakespeare. Frank finds comfort in stories of all kinds, from Shakespeare to movies to
newspapers. By the time he returns to school, his gift for language is obvious. In particular,
Frank's flair fo
Ch 1 Summary - CORRECT ANSWER✔✔- As Angela's Ashes opens, Frank describes how
his parents meet and marry in New York, then eventually move back to Ireland with their four
sons. He characterizes his upbringing as a typical "miserable Irish Catholic childhood,"
complete with a drunken father and a downtrodden, browbeaten mother. He tells of
Limerick's interminable rain, which spreads disease throughout the town.
Frank then backtracks and tells the story of his mother and father's lives before the birth of
their children. Malachy McCourt, Frank's father, grows up in the north of Ireland, fights for
the Old IRA, and commits a crime (unspecified by the narrator) for which a price is placed on
his head. Malachy escapes to America to avoid being killed. After indulging his drinking
habit in the States and in England for many years, he returns to Belfast, where he drinks tea
and waits to die.
,Angela Sheehan, Frank's mother, grows up in a Limerick slum. She is named after the
Angelus (midnight bells rung to honor the New Year), because she was born as the bells rang.
Her father drops her baby brother on his head and runs off to Australia. Ab Sheehan, Angela's
brother, is never the same after being dropped, but Frank recalls that all of Limerick loved
him.
Angela later emigrates to America, where she meets Malachy, who had just served three
months in jail for the theft of a truck carrying buttons. Angela becomes pregnant by Malachy.
Angela's cousins, the McNamara sisters, coerce Malachy into marrying Angela. He plots to
escape the marriage by moving to California, but he foils his own plot by spending his train
fare at the pub. The McNamara sisters mock Malachy for his strange ways and intimate that
he has a "streak of the Presbyterian" in him. Frank is born and baptized, and is joined a year
later by a brother, Malachy. A couple of years later, Angela give
Ch 2 Summary - CORRECT ANSWER✔✔- Upon their arrival in Ireland, the McCourt
family goes to Malachy's parents in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Grandpa seems
considerate of Angela, but Grandma greets her son's family coldly; Frank's aunts only nod
when introduced to their brother's family. Grandma tells her son that there is no work in
Ireland, and Grandpa advises him to go to the IRA and ask for money in recognition of his
service.
The next morning, the family takes a bus to Dublin. Frank's father points out Lough Neagh,
the lake where Cuchulain used to swim. Upon arriving in Dublin, Malachy takes Frank to the
office of a man in charge of IRA pension claims. The man refuses to give the McCourts any
money, saying he has no record of Malachy's service. After Malachy asks for enough money
for a pint, the man refuses to give him even enough money for bus fare home. Night has
fallen, and the family sleeps in a local police barracks, where the kind police and their
prisoners joke with the children. The next day, the sergeant's wife tells Angela that the police
have raised a collection to pay for the McCourts' train fare to Limerick. Frank's father shows
Frank a statue of Cuchulain outside Dublin's General Post Office.
Frank's family receives another stony welcome when they arrive in Limerick, this time from
Grandma, Angela's mother. Angela's sister, Aunt Aggie, is living with her mother because she
has had a fight with her husband, Pa Keating. The next day, Grandma helps the McCourts
find a furnished room on Windmill Street. The family must share one mattress, but they are
grateful for it after nights of sleeping on floors. That night, however, they discover that the
mattress is infested with fleas.
,A few days later, Angela has a miscarriage and must go to the hospital. Malachy finds out that
his dole is only nineteen shillings a week; to supplement t
Ch 3 Summary - CORRECT ANSWER✔✔- Angela decides to move her family from
Harstonge Street to a house on Roden Lane, because the room on Harstonge Street reminds
her too much of Eugene. The St. Vincent de Paul Society gives the family some secondhand
furniture. When they move into their new place, the McCourts discover that eleven families
use the lavatory that's built next to their house. Malachy wants to hang up his picture of Pope
Leo XIII, whom he identifies as a friend of the workingman. While driving a nail into the
wall to hang the picture, he cuts his hand and drips blood onto the picture.
Angela despairs at the reduced sixteen shillings a week that the family has to live on. Because
Eugene and Oliver have died, the family gets less money from public assistance. Malachy
McCourt Sr. takes himself off on long walks into the countryside and looks for work. When
he does find work, he drinks away his earnings. In his mind, the dole money goes to his
family, and the money he earns with a day's work on a farm goes to the bar.
Two weeks before Christmas, Frank and Malachy return from school to find that the first
floor of their house has flooded. The family moves into the upstairs room, which they
nickname "Italy" because it is warm and dry. Angela goes to the butcher's to get meat for
Christmas, but all she is able to obtain with her grocery dockets is a pig's head. As they carry
home the meat, Frank's classmates see them and laugh at their poverty. Frank's father is
disgusted that Frank had to carry the head home. He considers carrying things through the
streets undignified, and refuses to do it himself.
On Christmas morning, Malachy and Frank attend Mass with their father and go to collect
leftover coal strewn over the Dock Road so that their mother can cook the pig's head. Pa
Keating meets the boys on the street and convinces the landlord of Sou
Ch 4 Summary - CORRECT ANSWER✔✔- Crossed-eyed Mikey Molloy, who is eleven
years old, lives in Frank's neighborhood. He knows about the female body and "Dirty Things
in General." Mikey's mother, Nora, is often admitted to the lunatic asylum because her
husband frequently drinks away all of the money, leaving her frantic about how to feed her
family. Before she is taken away, Nora obsessively bakes bread to ensure that her children do
not starve while she is gone. It is unclear to what degree Nora is actually crazed and to what
degree she enjoys getting some peace and quiet at the asylum.
, Frank's First Communion, the first time he eats the Communion wafer, is about to take place.
Mikey is not a "proper" Catholic because he could never swallow the Communion wafer.
Mikey tells Frank that the best things about your First Communion day are that you receive
money from your neighbors and you get to go to the movies and eat sweets.
Frank's new schoolmaster is called Mr. Benson. Mr. Benson teaches his pupils the catechism.
He is an enthusiastic Catholic, but he dislikes answering questions. One boy, Brendan
"Question" Quigley, is constantly in trouble for asking too many of them. Another boy in
Frank's class is Paddy Clohessy, who is impoverished and wears no shoes. Frank recalls the
day he found a raisin in his pastry at school. Everyone begged him for the treat, but he saw
Paddy looking dogged and hungry, and gave it to him.
McCourt places scenes of the schoolboys learning their catechism by rote alongside a scene
of his friends and him sitting under the streetlights, reading their own books. Mikey tells his
friends about the great Cuchulain's wife, Emer, who was the "champion woman pisser of
Ireland" and won her husband in a pissing contest. Frank worries that he has committed a
terrible sin by listening to this tale and asks the Angel on the Seventh Ste
Ch 5 Summary - CORRECT ANSWER✔✔- Frank explains the snubs and silent treatments
that are a constant presence in his neighborhood. These resentments can be long-held: a
family might have alienated itself hundreds of years ago by helping the English or by
converting to Protestantism to avoid dying from starvation. It is said that those in the latter
group converted for a bowl of soup, and so they are called "soupers."
McCourt contrasts the lack of communication within his own family (his grandmother doesn't
speak to his mother, his mother doesn't talk to her siblings, his father doesn't talk to Angela's
family, and no one talks to his uncle's wife) with Angela's conversations with her neighbor
Bridey Hannon, which are open and affectionate. During one of the conversations, Angela
recites a poem that reminds her of herself and Malachy, because its subject is a girl and her
lover from the north of Ireland. Frank notes in bewilderment that his mother "goes into
hysterics" over the poem's ironies, particularly the third verse:
But there's not—and I say it with joy and with pride
A better man in all Munster wide
And Limerick town has no happier hearth
Than mine has been with my man from the North.
