Mikey Molloy's recurring fits

Mikey Molloy’s recurring fits are a condition woven into his everyday life and into the way his community judges, fears, and accommodates him. The episodes make him an object of concern and ridicule, affect his ability to receive Communion, and become part of how he explains the world; yet the narrative also presents him as a reader, a working boy, a son, and a friend. His life is not reducible to the fits, even as they repeatedly shape the choices available to him.

Identity and Introduction

Mikey lives around the corner from Frank McCourt and is eleven when introduced. The children in the lane call him “Molloy the Fit” behind his back, while adults describe his condition as an affliction. The nickname marks him by his episodes before it tells anything about his other qualities. He reads books brought home by his father from the Carnegie Library, and the children regard him as an authority on subjects they do not understand. He promises to explain them to Frank when Frank is older, presenting himself as a knowledgeable older boy rather than simply as someone to be watched for signs of a fit.

His crossed eyes are another conspicuous feature of how others perceive him. Mikey jokingly recasts them as an advantage, claiming that they would have helped him find work in ancient Rome and comparing himself to Roman emperors. His mother worries that reading will worsen his eyesight and says that an operation to straighten his eyes is unaffordable. His father calls him Cyclops, invoking a figure from a Greek story. These details show a family and neighborhood that interpret his body through jokes, anxieties, and stories, while Mikey supplies his own imaginative counter-explanation.

Fits, Faith, and Communion

Mikey’s episodes are understood differently by the people around him. The lane calls them an affliction, while Mikey says that he has visions during them; the narrative records both claims without confirming that the fits have supernatural meaning. His mother, Nora, is particularly troubled by the possibility that he might die during an episode and be condemned in the afterlife. Her fear is intensified by her belief that he is not a proper Catholic because he cannot receive Communion.

The obstacle is practical and specific: Mikey fears that anything placed on his tongue could bring on a fit and choke him. Mr. Benson repeatedly tries to accustom him to receiving the host by using small pieces of the Limerick Leader, but Mikey spits them out. The teacher refers the problem to a priest, who writes to the bishop; the bishop leaves the matter for the priest to handle. A note then instructs Mikey to practise at home with his parents, but he cannot swallow the newspaper pieces or even a piece of bread and jam shaped like a wafer. The repeated attempts bring a religious requirement into direct conflict with his fear of the physical act required to meet it.

The priest tells Nora not to worry and suggests that God may have a special purpose for Mikey, fits and all. Nora remains troubled by what she sees as the contradiction between his ability to swallow sweets and buns and his inability to swallow the Communion wafer. Mikey answers her fear with an argument drawn from his reading: he cannot believe that God would afflict someone with fits and then condemn him to hell as well. When asked whether he is sure, he says that he read it in a book. His confidence does not resolve Nora’s anxiety, but it gives him a position of his own within a religious question that adults otherwise discuss over him.

Work, Money, and Independence

Mikey’s life is not confined to the home, the school, or the family’s concern about his condition. On his First Communion day he collects more than five shillings and spends much of it on sweets and cinema visits. After becoming sick at the Lyric Cinema, he is kicked out by the ticket man, Frank Goggin; he goes on to the Savoy Cinema that same day. He looks forward to Confirmation because it will bring another collection, which he expects to be larger. The episode presents the religious occasion as a source of money and the cinema as a pleasure he hopes to pursue throughout his life.

By fourteen, Mikey is delivering coal and is described as larger than the other boys and strong from the work. He pays Quasimodo a shilling to be allowed up a drainpipe into a yard where boys hope to look through a window. Mikey’s money and physical presence alter the group’s arrangement: when Quasimodo says the others must go first, Mikey insists on going up. His work does not remove the risk associated with his fits, but it gives him earnings and a degree of leverage among the boys.

The Drainpipe Accident

During a Friday-night visit to Quasimodo’s yard, Mikey climbs the drainpipe ahead of the others. Quasimodo says that he lets Mikey go first because Mikey comes every week with a shilling and because refusing him could lead to a beating and to Quasimodo’s mother locking Quasimodo in a coal hole. As Mikey hangs from the pipe, he begins moving his hand in his pocket. The pipe shifts and collapses, and Mikey falls to the ground, saying that he is dead and destroyed. The account makes the immediate sequence clear: the pipe gives way during the climb, and a fit follows.

Quasimodo’s mother comes into the yard, sends Billy to summon help, and orders the boys inside. She locks her son in the coal hole. Mikey remains on the ground, jerking and twisting, until an ambulance takes him to hospital with a broken shoulder and a badly injured tongue. The mothers arrive quickly. Mrs. Dooley focuses on the disgrace of the boys’ presence outside her daughters’ window and says they should confess before Confirmation the next day. Angela McCourt takes a different practical position: she has saved for a year for Frank’s Confirmation suit and will not let the incident prevent him from wearing it. The episode therefore joins Mikey’s medical emergency to the neighborhood’s concerns about sexual propriety, confession, and the imminent religious ceremony, without making those concerns the cause of the accident.

Narrative Significance

Mikey’s recurring fits expose the gap between religious rules and a child’s actual bodily limits. The Communion attempts turn that gap into a recurring family and school problem: the expected rite is treated as essential, yet the very act required to perform it frightens Mikey. His reasoning offers a challenge to the idea that a physical condition should make him spiritually suspect, while Nora’s repeated fear shows how powerfully that suspicion persists around him.

The narrative also resists making the fits his only defining trait. Mikey reads, jokes about his crossed eyes, earns money, spends it on cinema and sweets, and makes plans for adulthood. At the same time, the accident at fourteen shows how an episode can become entangled with ordinary risks and with the behavior of other people. The pipe collapses during a climb undertaken for money and access; the subsequent emergency brings the mothers, an ambulance, and the next day’s Confirmation into the same scene. His condition is at once a personal vulnerability, a source of social labeling, and one circumstance among many in a boy’s life.