ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the various ways in which Frank McCourt has perpetuated the Irish narrative tradition at large and addresses the similarities between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Angela's Ashes. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes is not to be regarded as a return to the modern as such; Irish literary scholars would certainly agree that, at the least, it is a return to James Joyce. James Phelan, for example, has maintained that "one of the important precursor texts for Angela's Ashes is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and Peter Lenz that "the protagonist's psychological development calls to the reader's mind several parallels from Joyce's autobiographical novel". A good starting point is the discontent surrounding the alleged fictionality of Angela's Ashes. Slate is just one of many online sources interested in McCourt and the notion of truth.
