Soldier's Garden

Ever since I was young, I remember my father kicking soccer ball with me out in the backyard, throwing me into the pool, and finding me after I hid in the closet from hide and seek. However, in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Frank's father, Malachy McCourt, is not the usual childhood friend a son hopes for. Author shares throughout the novel about his father's drinking problem, carelessness for his family, and the lack to support his family. However, through all the faults in Malachy McCourt, Frank writes about his father without any bitterness and somewhat as a comforting man. Also, the faults in Malachy seem to motivate Frank to become a more caring and family oriented man, to never become like his father. Frank McCourt's acceptance and understanding of his father's inexplicable actions allows Frank to become a better man by learning from his mistakes and motivating him to never become like him.

Ever since Frank's childhood, Malachy McCourt was the paradigm of a horrible father, drinking away his wages, starving his children, and never caring about his family. As Frank starts out the novel saying, "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood... nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire..." (11), readers can understand how much of a misery Frank went through his childhood. Nevertheless, from this quote and throughout the novel, readers can feel his sense of good natured humor and absence of self pity. Frank never puts himself down for his father's faults or his family's misfortunes, but sees these events optimistically, as seen by the quiet humor. But as Frank says, "Two day later Dad returns from his cigarette huntÐ'... He has the smell of the drink on him." (39), this happens quiet frequently, and Frank is used to it as he is growing up in this hostile environment. As the father displays his actions in front of his little children, Frank rarely gets discouraged and hopeless, but is always looking forward to what is coming and is always optimistic.

As Frank grows up, he understands more and more about his father's problems, and is more determined to become his family's father figure, since his own father can't act as one. Through all the drinking and wasting his wages away, Malachy McCourt is a horrible father figure for Frank and his brothers. After his father fails to return home with the wages as usual, his mother, Angela, tell her kids, "Some day we'll all go back to America and we'll have a nice warm place to live and a lavatory down the hall like the one in Classon Avenue and not this filthy thing outside our door." (110). Through all the tough times in Ireland with his mother and his brothers, Frank manages to live on, surviving day by day by stealing and doing everything he can to help his family survive. As readers can see, all these hardships caused by Malachy give more desperation and hope for the McCourts to survive and make it on their own without their fathers help. But Frank does not always describe his father as a horrible and awful father, but also as a loving and passionate one.

Through the novel, Frank rarely criticizes his father, even though he is a drunk and a horrible father most of the times. However, there are times when Frank enjoys his father's presence, such as when they wake up early in the morning and listen to his stories about Cuchulain and his pastime stories. This side of his father is shown as Frank wrote, "I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland." (210). Malachy McCourt is shown to not be as the terrible father as readers think, since Frank McCourt's writing toward his father is mostly without