How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Grandma says to Mam, Your brother Pat, bad leg an' all, was selling papers all over Limerick by the time he was eight and that Frank of yours is big and ugly enough to work.
But he's only nine and still in school.
School. 'Tis school that has him the way he is talkin' back and goin' around with the sour puss an' the odd manner like his father. (7.22)
Even Grandma's pushing Frank to grow up fast. Despite child labor laws and school attendance laws in effect at the time, lots of Limerick boys had to contribute economically to the family.
Quote #5
He knows the next day we'll be getting Confirmation money and if we promise to pay him a shilling each he'll let us climb up the rainspout behind his house this very night to look in the window and see his sisters' naked bodies when they take their weekly wash. I sign right away. (8.7)
This passage shows Frank's emerging sexuality. Whereas last year he wanted to use The Collection money to buy candy and go to the movies, this year he pays Quasimodo so that he can get a glimpse of a naked girl.
Quote #6
On the way home I see myself in the glass of a shop window all black from the coal, and I feel like a man, a man with a shilling in his pocket, a man who had a lemonade in a pub with two coal men and a lime man. I'm not a child anymore and I could easily leave Leamy's school forever […] and my mother wouldn't have to be a beggar at the Redemptorist priests' house. (11.84)
Eleven year-old Frank wants desperately to grow up fast so he can be the provider his Dad never was. He's proud to look like a coal man with money in his pocket.