Many of us don’t have to worry about where we’ll be living in a month or whether we’ll be able to eat tonight; we have parents with a steady income and a life built around us, but not everyone is so lucky. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir following her dysfunctional family and their “adventures”. Despite many hardships as a child, she still manages to see the good in her upbringing and family: their loyalty to each other and the fun they did have together. Along with her older sister Lori and younger brother Brian, they manage to escape their impoverished childhood and become responsible adults, living the lives they hoped for as children. Jeannette Walls artfully captures her life story, showing the importance of resilience …show more content…
“Once he finished the Prospector and we struck it rich, he’d start on our Glass Castle” (Walls 25). The Glass Castle represents the father’s hopes and dreams, and he construes his family’s aspirations to hinge upon it too. It is a dream of being rich, of having a mansion and food on the table every mealtime. However, a glass castle is made of glass and glass is fragile and breakable; glass shatters, like Rex’s dreams are bound to. Rex is always wasting money under the pretense of earning even more of it. “He had all sorts of prospects that he was on the brink of happening” (Walls 69). This imagery of being on the brink of a cliff an idea, for example, helps illustrate why Rex has so many glass castles, a concept similar to his thrill of risk. The Glass Castle also represents Walls’s trust in her dad. Rex tells her that “‘there are times when I think you’re the only one around that still has faith in me’” (Walls 79). Walls realizes the Glass Castle is an unattainable dream after she decides to move to New York. Her confidence in her father lets her down over and over again and her faith finally falters when she realizes this; when she is able to even fathom that her dad’s castle is made out of nothing… more…. than….glass. Despite the implausibility of Walls’s hopes and dreams as a child, she is resilient and learns the problem of building her castles with this fragile material. Consequently, she becomes a …show more content…
Despite a less than ideal childhood of “adventures”, the majority of her and her siblings managed to make a happy, stable life for themselves. Walls shows the challenges they went through, due to their parent’s irresponsibility, and overcame, due to their strength of character. With the cards stacked against her, she managed to grow through fiery circumstances, make the foundations of her future out of more than glass, and find stability in a new
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).
Every day the safety and well-being of many children are threatened by neglect. Each child deserves the comfort of having parents whom provide for their children. Throughout the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls explains the childhood from being born into the hands of parent who neglect their children. Many may argue that children need to grow with their parents; however, the removal of children is necessary if the parents disregard the kid’s needs and cannot provide a stable life for their children.
Jeanette Walls is the picture-perfect illustration of an individual who finds righteousness for herself. She is the protagonist in the book “The Glass Castle”, who has an unfair miserable childhood due to how her parents were. Walls stands out for her determination as she goes out to the real world to seek her own justice, with the ultimate goal of being stable for once, and take responsibility for herself, not for the whole family.
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.
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.
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.
Being more engaged in his drinking, and less engaged in his word was one thing Rex Walls was good at. After neglecting this promise Jeannette, his favorite daughter, who always believed in him, eventually sees how awful alcohol makes him. Leading her to draw a end with believing in her father's word saying, “you will never build the glass castle” (238). Which then causes Rex to go into an even bigger depression.
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.
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.
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. Walls’ autobiography establishes that there are several causes of homelessness. More specifically, she discusses how poverty prevents one from affording life necessities. As reported by the National Coalition for Homelessness, “Homelessness and poverty are inextricably linked”.
...life living with yet loving parents and siblings just to stay alive. Rosemary and Rex Walls had great intelligence, but did not use it very wisely. 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. Showing that it does not matter what life throws at us we can take it. Rosemary and Rex Walls may not have been the number one parents in the world however they were capable in turning their children into well-educated adults.
The majority of families were once considered perfect. The father went to work everyday, while the mother stayed at home and cared for her two children, “Henry” and “Sue”. The children never fought and the parents were involved in all the community events. Our society has grown to accept that there is no such thing as a perfect family. Eleven-year-old Ellen from the book Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons, grows up in a household where her father is an abusive alcoholic and her mother is too sick to complete everyday tasks. By using her positive assets, and learning from her negative assets, Ellen was able to overcome a lot of challenges throughout the book.
The Glass Castle is a book about the Walls family. The mom is very homeless. Jeanette, the daughter and main character feels very sad and upset that her mother is homeless. When Jeanette was three, she got a terrible burn and was sent to the hospital. Once she was healed, her dad took her out without paying the bill. The Walls moved all the time for as long as the dad could keep a job. The dad struggled to keep his jobs because he is an alcoholic. Finally, they moved to a place in Nevada called, Battle Mountain. The father was holding his job steady there for awhile, so the mother decided to get a teaching job. After a minor altercation with law enforcement, the family had to move. The family was forced to move to Phoenix, mother had an inherited
Totoy has lost the innocent image that he had of his mother and will always see her this way. This causes Totoy to become disconnected from the family. This abuse is the only parenting Totoy ever gets, so it is the only parenting style he knows: “Totoy will try his best not to abuse his children. But he’s his mother’s son. He will”(28-29). Unfortunately, his mother’s parenting style is passed onto him. He is innocent to his mother’s abuse until this traumatic event, where he sees the true woman his mother is. Jeannette Walls has similar experiences with her parents. In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, her parents put their kids through many experiences no kid should have at their age. Walls writes, “‘We’re going to Phoenix,’ Dad said… Dad allowed each of us to bring only one thing”(89). They were uprooted from places that had started to feel like home and forced to leave many of their belongings behind because Rex would not stop his his drinking and gambling long enough to actually be a father. This planted the kids in situations that were foreign and frightening to them. Walls notes, “I went into Grandpa’s
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.