Dialectical Journal Text | Response | “People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early childhood, but nothing can compare with the Irish version”(11). | This is how he starts out the book and it is in a way introducing you to one of the worst childhoods that you can have. It also shows you that you can go beyond your childhood and become something or do something with your life. I think it is kind of weird that one of the worst childhood to have is Irish because that would not have been the first one on my list. | “The rain drove us into the church-our refuge, our strength, our only dry place”(12). | Although this is physically what happened to his family, I think that it is also saying that God helped them in their …show more content…

I love the way he describes the scene, slowing up all of the movements so that you see how spontaneous and not planned this affection from his father was. | “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 the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whisky and wants us to die for Ireland”(210). | After going through his holy communion, Francis starts to find parallels in the religion with people he knows. One of those people is his father. He describes his father as most Americans are. We are two-faced, have two different lives, different personalities, and secret things that nobody else knows about. He is starting to realize that most people are not just one person but can be several in one. | “By day you have the flies, by night you have the fleas. Mam says there’s one good thing about fleas, their clean, but flies are filthy, you never know where they come from, and they carry diseases galore”(211). | For some reason this quote really hit me. During this whole section they talk about all of the different struggles they go through, but the biggest one is the fleas and flies. Although they are both bad, each one has something more awful than the other. Also, I have noticed with the Irish culture that they were very scared of catching any disease in that time.