Angela's Ashes

“Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.” - Oscar Wilde

Throughout the memoir, Angel’s Ashes, Frank starts out when he was just a small child of four years old, and already his life was filled with nothing but misery and grief. This quote by Oscar Wilde describes Oscar’s childhood very well because he experienced all four depressing emotions: misery, shame, sin, and poverty.
The poverty of the Great Depression was widely spread and affected nearly every person in America, however, what made these times of scarce food and depression caused another past time to flare up- especially in the Irish: drinking. As told in the novel Frank’s father would often waste all of his money on alcohol even though he had many children at home to feed. In essence, poverty leads to sin since when people are feeling upset about their own lives they turn to alternative sources to create happiness.
Obviously, due to Frank’s poverty and his father’s sin, his life was very miserable. The deaths of nearly all of his siblings, and the constant breakdowns of his parents forced him into being the adult, at the age of four. He was forced to pick up bits of coal off of the streets, steal food for his siblings, and attempt to stop his father from drinking all of their money away. Frank had a lot of responsibility at such a young age and since his father refused to, Frank had to carry all of the shame that came with begging.
For Christmas dinner, he has to carry the pig’s head back to the house while the townspeople laughed at him. Also, he had to complete tasks such as stealing or begging for food because his father refused to remove his pride and take care of his family. Shame seemed to be the one thing that Frank’s father would not admit to even though it was his fault that they had no money and no food. With constant death and life being beyond difficult day after day, this quote really describes how Frank lived his every day life. Poverty and sin followed him, with misery waking him up, and shame crawling around him as he waited for his father to get home from the bar, night after night.

Schell Family's Loss Factor

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living” (113).

The quote above shows how all of the characters in the book have the feeling of loss. The grandfather, after losing his ability of speech, is constantly rambling on about how he is feeling and what is going on around him since he cannot fully express how he is feeling. He sees pain and loss and despair all around him in everyday life, which becomes locked inside of him, causing a weight of the world to be on his shoulders. The grandfather’s life experiences have been so traumatic from losing Anna and his un-born child, to losing his speech, finally to losing the son he never knew, regrets and feelings of sorrow weigh him down.
The grandmother also had the traumatic experience of losing her family in the Dresden bombings, however, when she finds her sister’s first love it seems to give her a bit closer to all that she had lost in the past. When her husband leaves her, all she has to cling to is this un-born child that ends up dying on “The worst day.” She now has nothing left but Oskar, causing her to feel constant fear that he will be hurt, physically or emotionally.
Although the reader only meets Oskar’s father for a brief period of time, there are indicators that this feeling of complete loss has been brought into his generation. He refers to loss, not as physically losing a person, but by losing knowledge he was never able to put to good use in his life. He refers to himself as just a jeweler but then corrects the New York Times as if it is his job, showing he has lost the ability to try and use his smarts for the outside world. As an effort to prevent this from happening to Oskar he sends him on wild chases that force Oskar to think on a whole other intellectual level and question all that is out in the world.
Oskar, a very bright young boy, cannot handle emotion of pain any better then his grandparents. He expresses the emotion he cannot tell anyone about by giving himself bruises. Whenever he feels upset or angry he takes out the pain on himself. Also, he has a folder that he titles “Stuff that’s happened to me.” In this folder there are pictures of different actions including a shark attacking a girl, and a soldier getting his head cut off in Iraq. Obviously, these things have never happened to Oskar personally, but because he has felt such loss he feels as if the loss of the world is on his shoulders. From the quote above, one can take that this feeling of carrying the worlds problems is being passed down through the family.