...The Glass Castle is a descriptive memoir written from the perspective of Jeannette Walls. As she eventually finds success as a writer, Jeanette recounts her dreadful childhood she faces raised by eccentric and egotistical parents. Rex and Mary, her parents, are very non-functional because of their drinking habits. Mom and Dad are very energetic people who push their kids, learing how to nurture themselves by feeding, clothing, and protecting one another. Jeannette Walls applies the lesson of self-discipline from her childhood in order to be self-sufficient in New York City. While not being the parent she wishes to have, Jeanette’s Dad teachers her to be self reliant when he tells her that she would be fine when learning how to swim. Jeanette...
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...The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls. The book illustrates her struggle through life and how her hardships shaped her into the person she is now. Jeanette is the second out of four children, she has an older sister, Lori, a younger brother, Brian, and a younger sister Maureen. The family is very dysfunctional, they are always doing the skedaddle and living in very poor conditions. They move all around Western America running from their father's mistakes. The way Jeanette's parents raised her, it took her a while to realize that the way she was living was not right, eventually her and Lori came up with a plan to get away from their toxic living conditions. The Glass Castle has three pages in the beginning reserved for praise...
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...Mrs. Scheller Engl 1302-7 5 December 2017 The Glass Castle Essay In the book the Glass Castle there were several things that were brought to light that i had never known about or thought about. Although this book was a roller coaster of emotions it is definitely one of my favorites. One thing that really stood out to me was, when Jeanette's mom was continuously selfish throughout the novel. When “Bryan yanked the covers back. Lying next to Mom was a huge family-sized Hershey chocolate bars”(Walls, 174). This just struck me the fact she would hide and eat a candy bar when her kids had nothing to eat or when she had expensive jewelry and land worth loads of money and chose not to sell any of it this causing malnourishment of her...
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...There are many themes throughout The Glass Castle, but one theme that sticks out the most is forgiveness. The act of forgiving someone is sometimes hard for certain people, also depending on the situation. Some people forgive others and some just forget the person and move on with their life. In The Glass Castle there is a family consisting of a mother and a father and children. The kids were raised poorly because of the way their parents lived their life. Despite these kids childhoods they still loved their parents anyway. Forgiveness is shown threw Jeanette’s relationship with her parents, mainly her father, and then the other kid’s relationship with their parents, also The Last Song is a story with the same theme. Jeanette’s father is Rex Walls. Rex has always had a probably with drinking. Growing up Jeanette had always seen her father get drunk and not be able to control himself. She knew that he had a problem very early on in her life. No matter the situation, Jeanette would always stand up for her father and defended him. Rex would let Jeanette down over and over again. It got to a point where Jeanette knew she could fend for both herself and her father, so she chose herself. Even though all the troubles Jeanette went through growing up with Rex as her...
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...The Glass Castle is a extremely detailed memoir of the upbringing of Jeannette Walls. Her life was an incredible journey with hardship meshed into each day she spent alive. But the hardship in Jeannette and her sibling’s lives did not discourage them, instead it drove them to become stronger people. Additionally, the events told of in The Glass Castle largely revolve on the idea of family, what it really means, and the roles of each family member. Jeanette’s family life involved harsh realities that she would understand as she matured. The life of Jeannette Walls was as adventurous and captivating as a work of realistic fiction, in the execution and the substance, but it is all true by the word of the author. The story of the Glass Castle...
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...daily basis. Poverty has been a major issue throughout the world, and places a wide span of negative affects on children. In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, The Wall’s family lives most of their lives in poverty which buries their children in stress, unstable environments, and misery. Poverty contributes to a lack in a child’s intellectual abilities, mental health, abuse, and family stability. Poverty puts a strain on children’s intellectual abilities in school. Kids who are in poverty feel as if they have no control over their life, and are less motivated to put forth effort into their education. This is also known as “learned helplessness”...
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...For young Jeanette Walls, the protagonist of her own captivating memoir The Glass Castle, life is much like fire in the way that it can be controlled for only a moment, before it begins to lose control and release its true wild nature. Throughout the book, Walls uses the motif of fire to portray life with her family and her own personal understanding of the damage and effects that such a life brought upon her. In my one-pager project, I used quotes to portray this evolution of understanding. As a five year old girl, Jeanette caught on fire while cooking herself hot dogs. After the incident, Jeanette became obsessed with fire, always lighting matches and blowing them out. She claims that she had become so captivated by the control that...
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...In the memoir The Glass Castle written by Jeanette Walls, portrays her dysfunctional family and her difficulties growing up. Jeanette is faced with numerous barriers throughout her life. Despite the many obstacles set forth by her parents during her childhood, Jeanette develops into a successful adult later in life. One of these obstacles is that Jeanette must cope with the carelessness of her mother, Rose Mary, while also dealing with the destructive nature of her father, Rex. Jeanette Walls uses plot, characterizations, and conflicts to convey that parent’s selfishness can be detrimental to their children. As a child Jeanette’s family is constantly moving from place to place and struggling to make enough money for foods. Jeanette’s father, Rex, makes it quite difficult to live as a well-financed family because of the money he spent on alcohol. Jeanette uses characterization to demonstrate that the selfishness of her father spending all the money for him rather than for the family. When Jeanette and her siblings are sitting around in their house with no food and no money to buy food one of her sibling said, ““dad needs to start carrying his weight.” Lori said as she started into the empty refrigerator. “He spends more money than he earns on booze” Brian said.”(78) Rex Walls could not provide for his family because what salary he earn, he goes out and spends it all on alcohol, leaving Jeanette and her siblings scavenging for food. Rex’s alcoholism had cause so much chaos...
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...1) Looking at the title, what do you predict will happen in this book? Why? By looking at the title "The Glass Castle" I believe that there will be either an imaginative glass castle or a real glass castle. I also think that in this book there will be a story about how the characters will achieve or arrive at the glass castle. I think the author will show us all of the obstacles that the characters had to go through to make get there. I predict this because the author would have not been titled the book "The Glass Castle" if there was not real or metaphoric castle. I also predict that in this story the main character will be a girl. I believe this because on the cover of the book there is a young girl. From my personal experience, I have come to find that most authors who are women make the main character a girl as a metaphor for themselves or someone they know. 2) What character do you like least? Why? My personal least favorite character in the book is Rose Mary Walls. She is my least favorite character because of the fact that she is always selfish towards her kids. She likes to make sure she is taken care of before of her kids. When Jeannete burned herself in the...
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...Everyone has a different American dream just like everyone has different opinions on politics and religion. This is shown throughout the book The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls. The American Dream was something that people thought was unachievable by most but in reality, it was achievable it just took a lot of hard work and effort, and a lot of people struggled with this part. A lot of hard work and effort were the main parts of the American dream, which caused a lot of people the inability to achieve it. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it beauty” (Walls 38). The tree represents the hard work or “struggle” that Jeanette and her family go through when trying to achieve “their” American Dream. I believe the real meaning...
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...parents who can't take care of themselves financially should not be able to take care of child. If a child is to grow up in a life style like this, there may be times where he/she will not be able to eat properly if at all. This would cause the child to suffer from malnutrition and starvation. Creating motives for the child to start stealing food from others and doing whatever if takes just for something to be inside of their stomachs. This can be seen when Jeanette steals food from other student's lunchboxes. "During recess at school I'd go back in the classroom and [take] something out of lunchboxes"(Wall). If a child is so hungry that they have to go so low as to steal food. Maybe the parents should not have had control of these kids. If Jeanette's parents had received a parental license they surely would have been taken away from them by now. One could argue that poor perspective parents could not get a license because of the cost of one and the fact that they are poor. This however is not true, anyone who applies to get a license can receive one regardless of the financial standpoint of the family. When applying for a parental license, parties that are under the poverty line will be granted a specific amount of money based off of the amount of children in that family. This money would be used on the children and nothing else. Families below the poverty line would be monitored on a monthly basis. To ensure that the child or children are getting fed and clothed properly. It is...
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...Jeanette's parents were extremely abusive and did not really care about her wellbeing or her siblings. I think based on her parent’s socioeconomic status and her father Rex's alcoholism; this only made the situation for her as a child growing up in rural poverty worse. She really should have just left her parents as they do not really want to change and based on her current upper middle class lifestyle as an adult; she really wants to help her parents out. They do not seem to want the help though and her mother will ask for ridiculous requests that she ultimately does not need! Why did she keep talking to her parents even though she does not want anyone to know who her parents are as she hides from them all the time out of embarrassment? This is what the plan is to discuss in my essay on the Glass Castle. I will talk about how Jeanette moved out of poverty from the hands of her two abusive parents, and how she feels about her parents current socioeconomic situation! Jeannette constantly had to move around in different small rural towns, located in the boonies of Nevada and a few other desert states. This would affect most children in a lot of ways; first you can have many mental health defects that will start to drain on a child’s overall mental and psychiatric...
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...Alcoholism is a very difficult and burdening disease that affects many different people all over the world. Alcoholism is a disease that not only affects the person suffering but the immediate family of the alcoholic. “Alcoholism and drug addiction affects the whole family- young, teenage, or grown-up children; wives or husbands; brothers or sister; parents or other relatives and friends.” ("Family Disease"). In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, her siblings and mother’s daily lives, health, and personalities were greatly affected by Jeanette's father, Rex Walls alcoholism. Some specific effects of alcoholism on families are conflict between spouses, infidelity, domestic violence, economic hardships, isolation or divorce, jealousy...
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...The book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls tells the story of Jeannette and her family. Jeannette certainly did not have the easiest life growing up, but she may have had one of the most interesting. I enjoyed the book because the experiences that Jeanette and her family went through make for a very exciting read. These experiences are out of the ordinary and don't represent how a typical American family would live. Jeannette was born into a rather peculiar family. She had a mother and father, and two older siblings, but the way that the family lived made them peculiar. Her parents were not the most cautious of her well being. They believed that their kids should be able to take care of themselves, and that too much parental intervention would lead kids into becoming too dependent. This said, one can imagine how the kids lived. Jeanette and her siblings were constantly in dangerous situations since supervision was limited. Walls even writes that her first memory is being on fire (9). She was making hot dogs over a stove and caught herself on fire. Her mother thought that it was a good idea to let her three year old daughter cook hotdogs over an open fire. She was alright other than a few burns and was hospitalized. Six weeks into her hospitalization her father comes to "check out, Rex Walls-style". He picks her up out of her bed and runs out of the hospital (14). Anecdotes like these are frequent in The Glass Castle. They are not all as tragic as this, but they are all very...
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...Throughout the memoir The Glass Castle, the most palpable theme is forgiveness. From Jeanette’s earliest memory of getting burned by cooking on her own, The Wall’s children were consistent matters of ache and let down due to their parents actions, in spite of the fact that they kept overlooking their mistakes. The second chapter opens up with a three year old cooking hot dogs. She ends up burning herself multiple times and has to be hospitalized. After returning home from the hospital, the mother lets her continue making hot dogs and says “Good for you, you have got to get right back in the saddle” (15). The author consistently demonstrates how she holds no negative sentiments toward her parents and the unpleasant childhood she went through....
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