The similar themes between Angela's Ashes and Night are the growth of the young male protagonist during a difficult situation to the point at which the protagonist is more powerful than his parents. In addition, the protagonists of both novels suffer the loss of their religious faith as a result of their experiences.
Frank McCourt begins his memoir with the phrase, "I wondered how I survived at all" (page 11). After his sister, Margaret, dies as an infant, his mother, Angela, is shaken and nearly catatonic from depression. As McCourt writes, "she has the wild look" (page 36), and she can hardly eat or speak. After the family returns to Ireland, they are desperately poor, and McCourt's younger twin brothers die. Angela is crushed by the tribulations she faces, and she largely resorts to relying on charity from the Catholic church and from public assistance, while McCourt's father, Malachy, leaves the family and spends his time and wages drinking. As a result, McCourt has to go to work at age 14 as a messenger boy. His father is largely absent, and his mother is what he describes as "a pious defeated mother moaning by the fire" (page 11). McCourt is on his own, and he must rely on himself. He assumes the responsibility of an adult, as his parents cannot provide for him.
In the process of maturation, he also becomes somewhat disenchanted with Catholicism, which he feels mainly instills feelings of guilt in him. The priests at his church refuse, for example, to give him confession on the day before his 16th birthday because he is drunk, and he is disgusted because he feels the church will not help the poor. He wants to become an altar boy, but the church turns him down because he is too poor. In the end, McCourt feels disappointed by his parents and by the church.
Like McCourt, Eliezer Wiesel, the narrator of Night, has to become his parents' caretaker. After the Nazis move into Hungary in 1944, Wiesel and his family are first sent to a ghetto and then to Auschwitz, a concentration camp. While Wiesel's mothers and sisters are sent to the gas chamber, he and his father, Chlomo, are sent to the labor camp. From that time on, until his father dies shortly before the camp is liberated, Wiesel becomes the parent. His father, weakened and depressed, becomes the child who Wiesel must look after. Wiesel becomes so tired of caring for his father that he even refers to him as "dead weight" (page 111) and does not cry when his father dies, as he's cried too much and is secretly glad to be free of the burden of caring for his father.
Similar to McCourt, Wiesel, once a religious person, becomes disenchanted with religion. When he sees a child being hanged in the camps, a man behind him asks where God is. Wiesel thinks, "And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..." Like McCourt, Wiesel's faith in his elders and in religion are crushed by his suffering. He finds religion of no avail, and, in the end, he is faithless.
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