Independence takes time and effort. Some are afraid to grow independent, they are happy the way they are and don’t want it to change. On the other hand there are people that need that independence and want to make a difference in their life and make it soon. The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeanette Walls. The book is about a family that has a hard life and struggles to get by, moving from place to place and sometimes not even having any shelter to protect them. The kids in the book, Lori, Jeanette, Brian, and Maureen realize that there is a better life they can have and work for. Jeanette, the main protagonist, has a hard life, but she learns to preserver through it. Her experiences have taught her to become more independent. Jeanette …show more content…
realizes her parents flaws and starts growing away from them. The parents really start to make the kids mad and frustrated about the lack of willingness to make life better.”If we are not charity cases then get a job....That sound like an awful life” her mom said. “Worse than this I asked.” (188). The kids are getting fed up with the parents not doing anything and that just helps them want to get away more. Rex Walls, the dad in the story, does some pretty irresponsible things to the kids, he drinks a lot, steals their money, and more. As Lori, the oldest child, is leaving for New York Rex says “This family is falling apart.” ”It sure is” said Jeanette (230). Here, Rex thinks that the family is falling apart because Lori is leaving, but what Jeanette thinks is completely different. She is thinking that the family is falling apart because of everything that the parents did to make their lives hard to live. The kids are leaving because they want a better life and can’t stand living like this anymore, but the dad just doesn’t see it. This shows that the urgency to get out and away from their parents flaws helped the become independent. Sometimes the Walls parents were neglectful and irresponsible but some of their lessons and actions taught the kids the need to be independent.
One of the lessons included independence at a very young age. At age three Jeanette was cooking hot dogs alone while her parents were in another room. “I started stirring the hot dogs again, I felt a blaze of heat on my right side. I turned to see where it was coming from and realized my dress was on fire.” (9). After the incident the Walls family brought her to the ER and took care of her deathly burns. Then right when her dad sneaks out of the ER she cook her hotdogs once again. First, she was independent to be cooking hot dogs at the age of three but the fact she did it after she got out of the hospital alone shows a lot of independence. Another lesson she learned was forced through learning how to swim. “He did it again and again, until the realization that he was rescuing me only to throw me back in the water...So instead of reaching for Dad’s hands I tried to get away from them.” (66) If you think about it in the big picture she learned to stop relying on her parents even though it was just learning how to swim she may have learned a greater lesson without even realizing
it. Jeanette has gained ambition and it’s helped her to drive towards a better life and independence. Jeanette is willing to do mostly anything to accomplish her goals. “I was afraid Mr.Becker wouldn’t give me the job if he knew I was only thirteen, so I told him I was seventeen.” (215). Jeanette needed money, and she wanted food and money to help around the house so to make life easier for her family she lied about her age to get a job for money. That shows ambition, her willing to do whatever it takes. Towards the end of the book Jeanette comes up with a great idea to put money into a fund that would go to transportation to New York. “I decided I wanted to go to New York too, and that winter we came up with a plan...I told Lori about me escape plan.” (223). Jeanette was a leader here trying to get her family to make the leap to moving on. This also shows that she wanted this really bad and that she had the drive to accomplish it. She had a goal of independence and no matter what she was going to reach it and she did. All of the bumps in Jeanette's life helped her become independent and create her own way. Her parents ways, teachings, and action, and her ambition have all added up to Jeanette's independence. Independence doesn’t come easy, and no matter if you have parents and a life like Jeanette’s or parents that make smarter decisions raising you and take you as first priority it still takes effort and hard work to achieve your goals.
Throughout the Glass Castle there is a constant shift in Jeanettes tone through her use of diction. Her memoir is centered around her memories with her family, but mainly her father Rex Walls. Although it is obvious through the eyes of the reader that Rex is an unfit parent and takes no responsibility for his children, in her childhood years Jeanette continually portrays Rex as an intelligent and loving father, describing her younger memories with admiration in her tone. The capitalization of “Dad” reflects Jeannette’s overall admiration for her father and his exemplary valor. “Dad always fought harder, flew faster, and gambled smarter than everyone else in his stories”(Walls 24). Jeanette also uses simple diction to describe her father, by starting sentences with, “Dad said,” over and over. By choosing to use basic language instead of stronger verbs, she captures her experience in a pure and honest tone.
Jeannette Wales, author of The Glass Castle, recalls in her memoir the most important parts of her life growing up as a child that got her where she is now. Her story begins in Arizona in a small house with her parents and three siblings. Her parents worked and didn’t do much as parents so she had to become very independent. Her parents and siblings were the highlights to most of her memory growing up. She is able to recall memories that most small children wouldn’t be able to recall with as much detail.
Is self reliance beneficial to children's survival? Self reliance is beneficial to survival for many children around the world. In the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls the parenting style of Rex and Rosemary Walls taught the children to have self reliance which is beneficial to the children's survival.
Individuals who are involved in self improvement ask themselves what the key to success may be. The key to success in life is, by far, self-reliance. Although there is nothing wrong with asking for or receiving help, the support of friends and family will only benefit us ephemerally. People go through their own personal journey of reaching the best version of themselves. That journey is best achieved with self-reliance. Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, is symbolic of the theme survival through self-reliance.
There are several different social issues presented in Jeannette Wall’s memoir “The Glass Castle.” These issues include neglect – medical and education. unsanitary living conditions, homelessness, unemployment, alcohol abuse, domestic violence. violence, discrimination, mental health issues, physical and sexual abuse, hunger and poverty. Poverty was one of the major key issues addressed in this memoir.
The Glass Castle is a memoir of the writer Jeannette Walls life. Her family consists of her father Rex Walls, her mother Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori Walls, her younger brother Brian Walls and her younger sister Maureen Walls. Jeannette Walls grew up with a lot of hardships with her dad being an alcoholic and they never seemed to have any money. Throughout Jeanette’s childhood, there are three things that symbolize something to Jeannette, they are fire, New York City and the Glass Castle, which shows that symbolism gives meanings to writing.
Character Response #1 “‘I didn 't propose to you,’ Dad said, ‘I told you I was going to marry you.” (Walls 27) This shows how Rex is a determined person, that he wants to be there for his wife no matter what happens. It shows he wants to be a wonderful husband and father and he won’t back down until he gets what her. He seems like a confident person and he is the reason they got married because he had true feelings for Rose Mary and he actually cared about her.
It is commonly believed that the only way to overcome difficult situations is by taking initiative in making a positive change, although this is not always the case. The theme of the memoir the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is that the changes made in children’s lives when living under desperate circumstances do not always yield positive results. In the book, Jeannette desperately tries to improve her life and her family’s life as a child, but she is unable to do so despite her best efforts. This theme is portrayed through three significant literary devices in the book: irony, symbolism and allusion.
Everyone has to deal with struggles during their everyday life. Some people’s problems are more serious than others, and the way that people deal with their problems varies. Everybody has a coping mechanism, something they can use to make the struggle that they’re going through easier, but they’re usually different. Some people drink, some people smoke, some people pretend there is no problem. There are healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms, and people will vary the one they use depending on the problem they’re facing. In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the author and her family deal with their struggles in multiple different ways as time goes on. However, the severity of her situation means that the methods she uses to deal with it are very important. That’s why it’s bad that Jeanette’s and her family have such unhealthy coping mechanisms, such
Author Jeannette Walls, just like so many other Americans in the United States was deeply impacted by poverty. Poverty in the United States is not an uncommon occurrence and thousands of people in the United States are currently being raised well below the poverty line. Jeannette Walls in her memoir The Glass Castle was one child who was greatly impacted in a positive way due to the lessons and hope her parents were able to give her. This gave her perseverance, persistence and power to become the successful person she has become today.
Education plays a big role in our daily lives. Education is commonly defined as a process of learning and obtaining knowledge. The story takes place beginning in the late 1950s to the early 2000s. Jeannette Walls is the main character of the story and the narrator. She tells the events of her life living with careless and yet loving parents. This family of six lived in many cities and towns and went through tough states to stay alive. Her mother and father never kept a good steady job, but they had great intelligence. Jeannette and her siblings barely went to school to get the proper education they needed. In the book The Glass Castle, author Jeanette Walls discovers the idea that a conservative education may possibly not always be the best education due to the fact that the Walls children were taught more from the experiences their parents gave them than any regular school or textbook could give them. In this novel readers are able to get an indication of how the parents Rex and Rosemary Walls, choose to educate and give life lessons to their children to see the better side of their daily struggles.
What is the source of your success? My own definition of success is about overcoming my obstacles and hardships. If I can’t overcome the obstacles and hardships along the way, then I will try again so that I am more prepared and have the right knowledge. I want to meet obstacles and hardships because I want to feel the pleasure of success when I overcome them. In order for me to overcome and embrace hardships, I need to find the missing link, have the right knowledge, and practice effective time management.
As children, we are naturally, curious, eager and willing to try new things. When they don’t work out we are quick to move on and try something else. We don’t waste time or start worrying about what didn’t work, we simply move on to trying something else. As we grow older we learn that failure is unacceptable and we always need to be on our feet and improving ourselves all the time so we can decrease the chances of failure. I believe that in this world everyone is hungry for success and no one wants to fail in something they would love to accomplish one day. Desire for success is like a “drug” in this generation, without success people look down upon you and will believe that you’re not worth their time without giving you a chance. The phrase
Embracing your past is a very important life lesson that not many people pay attention to nowadays and even decide to ignore all together, the theme of embracing your past is shown many times throughout the book, the most important events that have happened in the book are shown when Jeanette is at a business dinner and when asked about her parents and childhood life, she decides to lie and not disclose what her past was like. Another important event is when
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a harrowing and heartbreaking yet an inspiring memoir of a young girl named Jeannette who was deprived of her childhood by her dysfunctional and unorthodox parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Forced to grow up, Walls stumbled upon coping with of her impractical “free-spirited” mother and her intellectual but alcoholic father, which became her asylum from the real world, spinning her uncontrollably. Walls uses pathos, imagery, and narrative coherence to illustrate that sometimes one needs to go through the hardships of life in order to find the determination to become a better individual.