Angela's Ashes Essay | Critical Essay #3

Angela's Ashes Critical Essay #3

Thompson is a freelance writer who writes primarily in the education field. In this essay, she discusses McCourt's gifted use of some of the traditional elements of fiction and nonfiction.

Fiction and nonfiction seem unquestionably to be mutually exclusive categories. In a library, the figurative dividing line between the two becomes a literal division created by open space, shelves, or, at the very least, a printed sign. Despite the obvious division between the two genres, authors have perpetually married the two in a union that sometimes enhances its separate parts and sometimes diminishes them. Thus there is historical fiction, a full-.edged joining of fiction and nonfiction, along with a complete spectrum that ranges from fiction liberally sprinkled with fact to make it believable to nonfiction embellished by the traditional elements of fiction.

In Angela's Ashes, author Frank McCourt manages to create the perfect marriage of fiction and non...
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