Through the reading of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, many similarities in the main characters' environment come up. Each story is about a boy growing up in Ireland and each deal with similar problems. The main character of Frank McCourt's book is himself and the book is an interesting autobiography about his life in Ireland. Frank's family lives in constant poverty mostly due to his father's constant drinking. James Joyces's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is largely autobiographical, re-creating his youth and home life in the story of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. In this work Joyce made considerable use of the stream-of-consciousness, or interior-monologue, technique, a literary device that renders all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of a character with scrupulous psychological realism" (Ron). Portrait follows the young adulthood life of Stephen and...