...“The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls is an intriguing story of Walls’ family and their experiences. Through Jeannette’s story as both the narrator and the protagonist in the story, the actual state of Walls’ family is vividly described. Through the eyes of Jeannette, the reader finally shares the troubles of Walls family, where the parents are less concerned about the children. Jeanette herself is rendering the burden and responsibility of taking care of her siblings on her shoulders. In conjunction with the other Walls (Jeannette’s siblings), the theme of the story is relinquished while at the same time developing the character of Jeannette. This context will embark on describing the Walls from a family’s point of view while at the same time highlighting their attachment styles. Right from the beginning of the story, the immediate surroundings of the Walls Family is disgusting. It clearly portrays negligence which is symbolic throughout the story as portrayed by Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Though Rex is a loving and caring father, he is irresponsible. Despite his academic qualifications, he cannot keep any job when his family needs it most. Under his alcoholic cover, Rex becomes a completely different person (Walls, 2006, p. 25). Throughout the story, Rex lives a dignified life in dreams and illusions. This is the only way he escapes his responsibilities and problems as the head, the provider, and the protector of the family. A look...
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...Report on Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls 1 Book Report on Jeannette Wall’s Glass Castle Book Report on Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls 2 Jeannette Walls's story is one that gives the reader an idea of what it is like to grow up in a very complex and often self-destructive family system. Jeannette Walls's memoir Glass Castle begins with her riding in a taxi through contemporary New York City on her way to a party. As she looks out the taxi window, Jeannette sees her mother digging through a dumpster. Even though her mother had been homeless for years, Jeannette was all of a sudden filled with shame and gloom about her mother's life. Jeannette then begins to reflect on her childhood and how her Mom and Dad's choices affected her. The story then transitions to a three-year-old Jeannette and her story of catching her dress on fire while cooking her dinner. After a few days in the hospital, Jeannette's father shows up, lifts Jeannette out of bed, and leaves the hospital without paying the bill. The memoir continues with the family moving town to town in the American Southwest. Only staying in one place until Jeannette's father could no longer hold a job, or her mother demanding they spontaneously uproot and start again. Jeannette's father's paranoia about the state and organized society, coupled with his alcoholism, leads them to move more and more frequently. Finally, they settle down in a small mining town, Battle Mountain, Nevada, for a few months; where Jeannette enjoys adventuring...
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...” ― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle things usually workout in the end" "what if they don't?" "that just means you haven't come to the end yet” ― Jeannette Walls http://kmo236.hubpages.com/hub/The-Glass-Castle-Essay B.This is a novel that is full of tragedy's and the sad truth of what Jeannette walls had to live through in her child hood. C. Jeannette Walls is author of the memoir, The Glass Castle, which has been on the New York Times best-sellers list for more than four years, has sold an incredible 3.5 million copies in the US, and was named one of the "Top 10 Books of the Decade" by Amazon. The Glass Castle details Walls' life growing up in extreme poverty and describes the unimaginable obstacles she faced. From the desert of the Southwest to the mountains of West Virginia to her parent's homelessness in New York City, Jeannette Walls' account of an impoverished life is a compelling and moving first-person testament to what it means to be poor. She explains in detail the effects of poverty and tells the tale of her emergence from it D. Jennette walls was a brave soul that struggled but pulled herself out through all the tragedy's in her life. This novel was a way for Jennette Walls to show her story to the people around her telling them her straggles, happiness In Jeannette Walls captivating memoir, The Glass Castle, the reader becomes enthralled with Jeannette’s constant battle between defending her family and the greatness she hopes the Walls will amount...
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...Journal Entry 3; Red 1 The Glass Castle, the title of the book, was also the symbol of Rex Walls’s hope of happiness of his family, which was imaginary and unrealistic. Throughout the book, Walls promised Jeannette to build the luxurious Glass Castle with the glass ceiling and enough rooms for all the family members; and even in bad situations, the Walls Family believed the Glass Castle as the final hope to get out of the poor condition. The Glass Castle was significant for the father, because it represented his children’s trust toward him. When the children were young, they followed their father and his idea of building the Glass Castle. However, after “the hole for the Glass Castle’s foundation slowly filled with garbage”(Walls 155), the...
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...The Glass Castle In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the author reflects on her childhood growing up in an unstable household. The theme of Walls’ memoir reveals that a lifestyle change results in the ability to rely on oneself. Throughout the The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls’ actions, dialogue, and thoughts in response to events in her dysfunctional childhood shows that an unstable childhood does not have to negatively impact an individual. In the rising action, Jeannette’s actions during the period of time that her father is not around, conveys an essential moment of her acquiring a role of responsibility in her own life. The author writes, “We couldn’t afford wood any more than we could afford coal, and Dad wasn’t around to chop and split any, which meant it was up to us kids to gather dead branches and logs from the forest” (pg. 175). Jeannette Walls is trying to explain her childhood with a father that is an...
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...For her entire life, Jeannette Walls struggles to find the delicate balance existing between the turbulence wrought by her homelife and the order of society so despised by her father. Growing up, Walls was subjected to her father’s alcohol problems and thus poverty ensued. Exhibiting unwavering loyalty towards her incompetent father, Walls would vigorously defend him against familial and outside antagonizers. Yet after this alliance shattered, she rejects her father’s precepts feeling ashamed of her upbringing and soon after moved to New York. When Jeannette asks her mother about what she should do when people ask about her parents’ situation or her past, her mom said “Just tell the truth” (5). In her memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls...
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...[In the Glass castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeannette sleeps on a cardboard box all her childhood because her parents didn’t have enough money for beds.] The Walls family goes through life with little to no money and the kids still find a way to succeed in life. The Walls children do not have it easy they have to work hard to accomplish their goals. *The Walls children show that it takes hard work and determination to succeed without money or wealth.* In the book Jeannette and her siblings had to adapt to life without money. There’s an example in the book where Jeannette wouldn’t have enough money for braces, so she would have to make them with stuff like rubber bands and a clothes hanger. “ It would take about four years to raise the money....
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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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...learns that in order to live a life of contentment after losses that occur to his family during war, he must learn to accept the fate God allows. Jeannette Walls, in The Glass Castle, also learns that her salvation in life comes from acceptance of both her parents and her past. Resilience is a quality that can be modeled, but most people gain this trait from enduring and overcoming the hardships that they face in order to survive and ultimately, thrive. (OR): Christy Brown from My Left Foot, Jonathan Iwegbu from “Civil Peace” and Jeannette Walls from The Glass Castle are resilient in their ability to overcome hardship. In the autobiography, My Left Foot Christy Brown… In the short story, “Civil Peace,” …….. In Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette depicts her journey through a chaotic childhood to adulthood; in this tale she learns to transcend poverty with forgiveness and grace. For example, when her father terrifies her by throwing her in the Hot Pot springs, he says to her, “If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim” (Walls 66). Struggling alone in the water, she learns that no one can save her but herself. Whether cooking her own hot dogs, or dealing with bullies at school, Jeannette grows into a strong, self-sufficient girl. Her childhood is lost, but she gains the maturity of an adult in order to care for her own needs. In addition, Jeannette undergoes many embarrassments during adolescence; she explains: Other kids...
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...doesn’t fall far from the tree.” But what is the reality of this statement? Are children always similar or identical to their parents behaviour? The memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a piece of literature that one can study and relate to this philosophy. Children are influenced to become who they are by their parents’ positive and negative actions. Jeannette’s creativity is derived from her parents. Her mother, Rose Mary Walls, has possessed artistic abilities since she was a child. Throughout The Glass Castle, Rose Mary is always painting. When she is stressed or has spare time, she grabs a brush and a canvas and lets the paint flow. Jeannette’s father, Rex Walls has a big imagination and...
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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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...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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...The Glass Castle Reflection In Jeannette Walls’s Memoir, she describes how her father, Rex, wants to build a glass castle for him and his family to live in. In the book, she writes, “...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” (Walls 25). Rex wanted to make this happen for his family but unfortunately, his plans weren’t so realistic. So if I could build a glass castle the location of my glass castle would be in Atlanta, GA. I chose this location because I have family down there and I always travel down south every year. I chose to have 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a kitchen, an attic, a living room, a dining room, patio, and a basement. I chose to have these things because if I’m going to have a dream house I want it to be realistic, I don’t want to have unrealistic things that I know I’m not going to be able to afford. My favorite...
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...People have said, “The hard way ends is in the easy way.” Throughout The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls, Rex the father does not follow this advice. He is a caring yet neglectful father. He is a smart man that could have gone far in life but chose to be lazy and get in fights for the people he works for. Rex ended up becoming an alcoholic father and starting to be absent with his family because of it. He would never make the right decisions and ended up having him or his family pay for it. In this memoir, readers see that Rex Walls unrealistic dreamer that changes from a thoughtful, more caring father to being a selfish and absent one. In the memoir readers notice that Rex is a unrealistic dreamer. Rex really wants to build this big dream house called the Glass Castle. “He was telling us all the wondrous things he was going to do”. “ Like build the glass castle”(Walls, 25). This quote shows that Rex has dreams like...
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...There is a certain defensive aspect that comes along with memoir writing. No matter how happy or horrific the story is, it is the author’s natural instinct to defend it. Similarly in everyday life, there are things that people are naturally inclined to defend such as family, friends, or the way in which someone chooses to live their life. Maybe their choices or actions aren’t exactly admirable or necessarily considered “right”, but nevertheless they defend them if anyone were to ever challenge them about their legitimacy. In Jeannette Walls captivating memoir, The Glass Castle, the reader becomes enthralled with Jeannette’s constant battle between defending her family and the greatness she hopes the Walls will amount to, and settling for the fact that her family is based off of false hope and senseless lies with her incredible story telling techniques. The time the Walls spent living in Welch, Virginia serves as a major transition period for everyone in the family. While Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen were all growing up and trying to discover their identity, Rex and Rose Mary Walls were still struggling to discover the identities they always longed for but never could make a reality. Before the Walls move to Virginia, it was clear that just picking up and moving wasn’t as easy as it always had been, and the idea of a “great adventure” meant nothing more than a long car ride with only one...
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