In Jeannette Wall’s book The Glass Castle, the narrator and author Jeanette has had various terrifying encounters with chaos and destruction. She was burned cooking hot dogs when she was young, frozen in the winter, and starved when her family was low on money. Each time, she has pulled through and survived. In The Glass Castle, fire is a symbol representing chaos, destruction and fear. Jeanette has fought many battles involving neglect, starvation, and poverty but she has always pulled through these destructive experiences just like when she was a child burned from the hot dogs.
At the very beginning of The Glass Castle Jeannette’s dress lit on fire resulting in serious burns alongside the left side of her body. She survived those burns and then interestinglyresiliently became attracted to fire.“A few days after mom and dad brought me home, I cooked myself some hot dogs.” -Jeanette
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Walls (15) After being burned Jeanette was not afraid of fire, she fought through the pain and became curious of it. While she was in the hospital the nurse told her that everything would be okay, Jeanette replied with “If I’m not, that would be okay too. As Rex Walls said when a neighbor asks why she was not scared: “She already fought fire once and won” (16) Jeanette had survived her encounter with fire, setting the tone for her run-ins with her following struggles in her difficult life. Jeanette is interested in fire, possibly by its ability to do both good and harm. (1) After she was burned, Jeanette faced many more challenges, including poverty. Years after Jeanette was burned, Jeanette and her family is constantly starving and sometimes in need of a home, each time pulling through using her wits and her never-give-up attitude.
“I lay awake at night, rubbing my feet with my hands, trying to warm them.” Jeanette (176) In this scene, Jeanette is trying to keep warm inside of their poorly insulated shack in Welch, West Virginia. She was forced to face a freezing winter with only a stove inside of their living room to keep warm. Another time she says: “We did eat less. Once we lost our credit with the commissary, we quickly ran out of food.” (67) This is the height of the hunger in the Walls family. Rex lost his job and had no money coming in. Jeannette tried not to complain but when she couldn’t keep it inside anymore and let one small word of complaint her mother replied with “It’s not my fault you’re hungry” P.(69). This is a good example for how neglectful Rosemary is. It is in fact her fault that they are hungry because it is her responsibility to take care of her children. This is a perfect segway to the next issue,
neglect. The Walls children had been neglected their whole lives. Jeanette has had to survive these flames by continuing to look after herself and her brother and sisters. One time, Rex stole a ham and they lived off of it until it was full of maggots “Just pick out the maggoty parts” Rosemary said. Prior to this When Jeanette got a deep cut from a rusty nail, her mother sent her back out to play despite her injuries telling her that it was “Only a flesh wound” and that she would be alright. Rex would also leave the children for days at a time, making them fight for themselves and take care of their narcissistic mother. Even though fire is supposed to represent fear, Jeanette does not show many signs of being afraid. These pieces of evidence are examples of how Jeanette has survived through her neglectful parents, homelessness, and poverty just as fire represents chaos fear and destruction. The burns from when she was a child may have been the easiest challenge she faced as a child. Jeannette had been starved, frozen, and burned. But she still survived and became successful in New York City. During her childhood, she had to eat maggoty hams to nourish herself, she had to try to keep warm in the harsh winter, and she had to manage the house when Rex would leave for days at a time. Just like when Jeanette was a child burned by fire and living to tell the tale, Jeanette survived a childhood of poverty, starvation, and abuse, making it out alive and able write about it to tell others.
The Armenian genocide ruins Vahan Kenderian’s picture-perfect life. Vahan is the son of the richest Armenian in Turkey and before the war begins, he always has food in his belly and a roof over his head in the book Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian. Life is absolutely quintessential for Vahan, until the war starts in 1915, when he endures many deaths of his family, losses of his friends, and frightening experiences in a short amount of time. He is a prisoner of war early in the book and is starved for days. As he goes through life, he is very unlucky and experiences other deaths, not just the deaths of his family. Vahan ultimately becomes the man his family would want him to be.
One of the ways Jeannette survived her tough childhood was her ability to stay positive. Throughout The Glass Castle, Jeannette was put in deplorable houses, and at each one she tries to improve it. “A layer of yellow paint, I realized would completely transform, our dingy gray house,” (Walls 180). This quote from the text provides readers with the sense that Jeannette’s “glass” is always half full. Instead of
Act 1 of Mr. Burns was the only act in the play that places it characters in a casual setting. It was easy to decipher the type of characters the actors were portraying in the scene. For example, the actor who played a meek character ported this by taking up as little space as she could and crouching behind objects. Also, two characters were pretty intimate with each other. They cuddled around the fire when discussing the probability of a power plant shutting down and shared soft smiles with each other. I felt that the characters were allowed to be themselves in this scene compared to the other acts. In Act 2, the characters were at work that called for them to have a professional mindset, even though they were familiar with each other. The
She went off to seek the person she was meant to be. She had a purpose now, and this gave her a quest. She never gave up because she wrote the memoir from New York City and even saw her homeless mother as she passed by in a taxi on her way to her city apartment (Walls 9). Jeannette was determined on her quest and persevered through it all to become the person she is today. By utilizing symbolic, character, and situational archetypes such as fire, a hero, and a quest, Walls effectively conveys her theme of perseverance in her memoir, The Glass Castle.
In the book, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls there were many conflicts throughout the book, and the people in the situations made different decisions and actions depending on how they were involved in the conflict. The title of the book itself is a metaphor that signifies false promises and hopes. The author uses Mary literary devices to show adversity. The person that stood out the most in how he dealt with things was Rex Walls, since he’s the one who took different actions and decisions when a problem came their way. Jeannette Walls uses a lot of literary devices to show the adversity of building a family and how people’s actions and decisions depend on the conflict.
Jeannette and her siblings learn to provide for themselves and try to avoid the continuous problems caused by their parents and others around them. The effects of poverty, as witnessed through The Glass Castle, are still felt throughout America today.
Although fire is linked to human life, as it is essential for survival, not only its use for food, security and warmth, particularly in the extreme cold weather but also it could harm and smolder entirely. In Mary Shelley 's novel, “Frankenstein,” fire exists
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.
Fire represents change in the novel because fire allows Montag to undergo a symbolic change in which he stops using fire to burn knowledge but instead help him find it. Guy uses fire to change by burning his house and Captain Beatty. This is demonstrated when Montag said, “We never burned right...” (119) This quote exemplifies that now, in setting the Captain on fire, he was using the fire equipment for a sound and valid purpose, the right reason to burn, to purify and get rid of that which was poisoning the society, starting with Captain Beatty. Also He burns his own house and then turns his flamethrower on Captain Beatty, killing him. Montag then makes his escape from the city and finds the book people, who give him refuge from the firemen and Mechanical Hound that is searching for him. The burning of his house and his Captain as well as the fire trucks symbolizes Montag's transformation from a mechanical drone that follows orders, to a thinking, feeling, emotional person, who has now broken the law and will be hunted as a criminal. He is an enemy of the state once he turns his back on the social order and burns his bridges, so to speak, he is set free, purified and must run fo...
As we go through the stories in the Glass Castle we see the relationships and independence Jeanette builds starting very early in the book when she depicts herself as a little child making hotdogs. When Jeannette was three, her parents allowed her to cook for herself over hot stoves and all. This showed how much her parents put in to developing their independence. “I was wearing the dress to cook hotdogs. then all of a sudden my dress caught fire.
In “Barn Burning” the setting is a time when people drove horse wagons and the workingmen were generally farmers. The major character in this story is Colonel Sartoris Snopes, called “Sarty” by his family who is a ten-year-old boy. In the beginning, Sarty is portrayed as a confused and frightened young boy. He is in despair over the burden of doing the right thing or sticking by his family, as his father states,” You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you.”
The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls. It not only describes the story about her strange and crazy childhood but also recounts memories of her father and mother in instances where they understood and loved each other. Throughout the novel, Jeannette Walls explains the hardships of her poverty filled childhood and the endless risk of not being able to find food. Raised by an alcoholic father and crazy mother, Walls describes her unique homeless life all through her childhood. When Jeannette's Dad wasn't drinking, he taught them many different subjects and how to live life without a fear in the world. But when he was drinking, he was untruthful and abusive. "When we tried to help him he cursed and lurched at us, swinging his fist," (Walls 289). Jeannette's Mom was a non-conformist who was against the idea of staying at home and didn't want the commitment that came with raising children. "Mom didn't like
“She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been lethal” (26). This quote provides foreshadowing to what the future has in store for them as well as shows how much the community they once knew had changed. In the span of just a few weeks their community had gone from possibly being annoyed by this situation, to beating a human until they were quiet. This rapid change also had a lot to do with their close quarters confinement, and sense of doom. This ordeal all started with the woman yelling, “Fire! I see a fire!”, so the words were either very important or traumatizing for her. Based on the words she was yelling I’d say they leaned more towards traumatizing. At the time the other characters had no way of knowing what she was saying might affect them but she was determined to make her message heard. The last part of this section that secures the with for ‘fire’ is how accurate she was with her prediction. Even though she only said a handful of words, all of those words described
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.
In Amy Lowell’s “Fireworks,” Lowell shows the dangers of holding onto a bad relationship. Lowel uses the connotations of fireworks to establish the peril that can come with the joys of fireworks. “ Lowell uses imagery to enforce this danger that may come with seeing someone you’ve had a defective relationship with. “And go up in a flaming wonder / Of saffron cubes, and crimson moons” (14,15). The use of warm colors, like red, links to the risk of this relationship. The sharp edges and points of the shapes displayed could also signify the danger of being with this particular person again. When they meet their mixed energy creates a dangerous atmosphere that the narrator should remove themselves from. Lowell also uses the connotations of fireworks