The Glass Castle Symbolism Essay

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Fire. Neglect. Sexual Molestation. No one child should have to face what Jeannette Walls had to endure as a young child. However, Walls clearly shows this chaos and the dysfunctional issues that she had to overcome while she was growing up. Within her memoir, The Glass Castle, Walls incorporates little things that were important in her life in order to help the reader understand her story even more. These little things amount to important symbolisms and metaphors that help to give the story a deeper meaning and to truly understand Jeannette and her family’s life. Although she had many good symbols, the two symbolisms that had the biggest impact on the storyline, ties together and that adds more depth in her memoir are the piggy bank and New York. The piggy bank, named Oz, represented a place to escape, it represents a way out, and a new life or way …show more content…

Another piece of symbolism that represents to work by herself and gives great depth to the story and her memoir is the title itself, the Glass Castle. The Glass Castle represented freedom from the dysfunctional life and somewhat happiness to and for the family and not only that but to life a better life. “All of dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert” (25). All their lives, they have been promised a great big house for their whole family to live in and just live the “American dream” in a happy, stable family. Throughout the book, the goal for the end of all of this drama and nonsense is to be living in the Glass Castle. Towards the end, as she was moving away to New York, he tried doing and saying what he could to keep her back, “I stared at the plants. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘You’ll never build the Glass Castle’” (238). Jeanette now realizes that the Glass Castle will never be built, which means their family will never be normal nor

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