The Theme of Hunger in Angela's Ashes and a Moveable Feast

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Hunger is defined as a strong desire, or craving. Ernest Hemingway and Frank McCourt, the brilliant authors of A Moveable Feast, and Angela’s Ashes, respectively, both use the theme of hunger as not just the literal meaning of having a lack of food, but also as having a desire to fill a void left open in their lives. Although Hemingway and McCourt both experienced great pain caused by their hungers, it was those same hungers than drove them to their success and made them who they are now. The feeling of hunger is most often referred to as simply just a need for food. Hemingway and McCourt think too deeply to accept hunger as just an elementary concept. Hunger can be the desire for anything and is often very painful and hard to satisfy. Luckily for Hemingway and McCourt, they both had enough drive and passion that they fulfilled their respective hungers. Hunger is a recurring theme used by Hemingway throughout his book, A Moveable Feast. Both physically and metaphorically, Hemingway uses hunger to discipline himself to become the best writer he can be. Often he would freely skip eating lunch just to make himself hungry, pretending he cannot afford to go out for food but still tells his wife that he is having lunch with his friends. Hunger is such a relevant theme and is used so heavily by Hemingway that a chapter is even titled “Hunger is a Good Discipline”. In this chapter Hemingway describes how he uses hunger to motivate himself and push him to succeed. He makes his theory on hunger very clear when he states, “It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it” (Hemingway, 75). In the absence of eating, he walks around Paris looking for motivation and fuel for his writing. He uses hunger to drive him to be successful and

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