In the memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls writes about her family's struggles with poverty, family dysfunction, and constantly moving. Specifically in this excerpt (pages 96-98), Jeannette’s family moves again from her grandparent’s house to a more desolate one. The house they now live in is described as shabby, poorly built, and dangerous, which none of the kids are happy about. Despite her dad’s reassurance of a future house being built, Jeannette still wants to leave and move back to their ‘home’ in Phoenix, Arizona. Throughout the excerpt, Walls uses figurative language and repetition to portray the big idea of a lack of contentment.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir told from the perspective of a young girl (the author) who goes through an extremely hard childhood. Jeannette writes about the foodless days and homeless nights, however Jeannette uses determination, positivity, sets goals, and saves money, because of this she overcame her struggles. 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).
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.
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.
Throughout the book The Glass Castle, Jeannette and her family are essentially homeless, which leaves them with dealing with the daily struggles that come along with it. Although there are only a few instances where the Walls did not have a home, the conditions they lived through were horrendous. Jeannette and her siblings cope with their situations in many ways. At the beginning, the children never complained. Their parents Rex and Rose Mary had significantly different coping mechanisms. While Rose Mary was painting or sleeping, Rex was heading to the local bars. Their ways of dealing with their living situations and overall economic and political status did not help the siblings lead a fulfilling childhood. Coping mechanisms
The novel The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls, brings to the surface many of the the struggles and darker aspects of American life through the perspective of a growing girl who is raised in a family with difficulties financially and otherwise. This book is written as a memoir. Jeannette begins as what she remembers as her first memory and fills in important details of her life up to around the present time. She tells stories about her family life that at times can seem to be exaggerated but seemed normal enough to her at the time. Her parents are portrayed to have raised Jeannette and her three siblings in an unconventional manner. She touches on aspects of poverty, family dynamics, alcoholism, mental illness, and sexual abuse from
Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, has most definitely responded to Faulkner’s outreach, and responded very strongly at that. She has more than accomplished her duty as a writer. Her memoir The Glass Castle is one of the most honest, raw, emotion and heart-filled pieces of literature ever to grace humanity. In this memoir, Walls uses many various rhetorical strategies to fulfill her duty as an author and embrace Faulkner’s message. Throughout the book, every range of emotion can be felt by the reader, due in large part to the expert use of Walls’ rhetorical strategies. These rhetorical strategies paint such vivid images that the reader can feel the sacrifice, the pity, and the love of Walls’ story as if they were standing alongside Jeannette herself.
A suburban life is a paradise full of shopping, colorful gardens, and well-groomed homes. Despite all these benefits, a suburban life is an isolated life. People living in suburbs are rarely exposed to miseries in society. One of these conflicts is homelessness. When living in an environment surrounded by homes, individuals often have difficulty imagining not being able to sleep in a warm bed, eat a proper meal or even receive necessary medical attention. This grim situation is depicted in the writings of Jeannette Walls. In the autobiography The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls accurately portrays homelessness by explaining its causes, its impact upon daily life, and its effect on victimized families.
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
This passage is significant, because it is mentioned for the first time that the institution is in the countryside, which demonstrates a direct contrast between the freedom of nature and the restricted, mechanized world that nurse Ratched tries to retain within the walls. The authors heavily utilities techniques such as specific details and imagery, which are used as symbols that, are representing a bigger picture of how society actually works. The author’s use of sentence lengths and punctuation also served to emphasize the symbolism and overall impressions of this scene.
Wall’s memoir The Glass Castle accurately portrays her horrifying life of growing up in extreme poverty. The memoir unravels a true story about Jeannette Walls’ brutal childhood as she grew up homeless and often lacked even basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter. Walls’ father Rex raised his children irresponsibly, leaving them with many mental and physical scars while compromising their safety. Similar to the way Walls was raised, human cruelty remains evident in the Mac Davis song “In The Ghetto,” where the lyrics describe an endless cycle of poverty and crime. However, the movie Les Miserables depicts the
In the book, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls is trying to tell us that her parents are taking her happiness away. In this section, young Jeannette is witnessing how her parents get into argument about money and disrespect people who are trying to help their condition. Walls says, “I thought Grandma Smith was great. But after a few weeks, she and Dad would always get into some nasty hollering match. It might start with Mom mentioning how short we were on cash” (Walls 20).
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.
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.
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.
What would happen today if we began changing all of our history books? In George Orwell’s novel, 1984, that is exactly what takes place. The novel begins with a middle aged man, Winston Smith. Winston lives in Oceania, a dystopian society, where the Party controls everything. This includes what people in such society think, believe, see, and say. Can one believe that the destruction of language and the past can be used as tools to manipulate people into believing anything? The answer is yes, the destruction of language and what occurred in the past can be used as tools to make people believe anything and everything. The destruction of language and the past is used to show positive images within the government. In addition, society is forced and limited to speak one language. Finally,