The glass castle is a memoir of Jeannette Walls (author and narrator). In this memoir, she is…
Maureen is often forgotten throughout the entire story of The Glass Castle written by Jeannette Walls. We are very tragically reminded of Maureen’s presence when she stabs her own mother while living in New York. Reflecting back to the beginning of the story, we can see why Maureen has a mental breakdown. She is born into a world of violence, her parents fail to care for her, and she lives her entire childhood in neglect.…
The physical struggles mentioned above also come together to form the large struggle of finaical insecurity. Walls expresses in the novel that she along with the rest of her family went without food for weeks because of the lack of funds. Jeannette describes a scence where in her elementary school bathroom she would pick out the leftover food that the other children would throw out. Jeannette shows her lack of understanding when her peers “tossed away all this perfectly good food; apples, hard-boiled eggs, packages of peanut-butter crackers, sliced pickles, half-pint cartons of milk, cheese sandwiches with just one bite taken out because the kid didn’t like the pimentos in the cheese” (173). She points out that sometimes there was more food in the trash then she could of eaten, this is when she begins to take some of the food to her brother to ensure that he was eating as well, but she does not take any home for her mother. With the state of the Walls’ finaicial insecurity comes the the undeniable fact that they were unable to pay rent. Therefore the Walls family moved quite often to avoid the bill collecters or as her father…
In the memoir, The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette walls, we see how Jeannette’s childhood with her extraordinary parents shapes her identity and sense of value. Rex and Rosemary Walls, the parents of Jeannette, can be seen as irresponsible and careless people, although they raise Jeannette as an extremely resilient, independent and warm-hearted person in the future.…
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir relaying the young life of the author as she struggles to live through poverty with her family. As he gradually ages throughout the book, Jeannette has to face the hardships of a normal growing girl while also facing problems that go on behind closed doors. Walls gives the reader hard-to-read tales of growing up, acting as a parent figure to her younger siblings due to neglect, and trying to keep the family financially stable. At the same time, as she ages and becomes more mature, she tries to break free from her familial roots and move to New York. Once it seems like Jeannette and her siblings have their chance to get out and move to New York, their parents follow them there and decided to live on the streets without a home. Now Walls and her siblings, whom have all moved on, must…
Every time the going got rough, they would just leave behind the life they had created in their temporary town and start anew in a new town. Jeannette loved the running, because it meant more time with her family and being in the desert; also it meant they were closer to building the “Glass Castle”. The Walls’ father, Rex, always promised his children that all of this running was just a temporary measure, “All we had to do was find gold, Dad said… he’d start work on our Glass Castle.” (Walls 25) This dream represented Rex’s hope to be something to his children, but his drinking keeps on prolonging their dreams by keeping him unmotivated. However, Jeannette ignores her father’s drinking as a child, and thinks “...Dad was perfect, although he did have what Mom called a little bit of a drinking situation.” (Walls 23) During one Christmas, the Walls had no money at since Rex had lost his job; so Rex decided to take each of his children out into the desert and have them pick out their own star. Jeannette accidentally picked out Venus instead of a star, but Rex decided that she can have Venus, even if it was a planet. This memory shows how Rex wishes he could give more to his family. When he had nothing, he managed to give his children one of the best Christmas presents they could have…
It was a very touching story: the Glass Castle, in which author Jeannette Walls tells the world about her greatly influential past. This passage I chose reveals one of the most significant characters in her life, her father; it recalls on the things that he did for her, or his attitudes and ways of life that is very influential in the author’s life. When her father speaks in the book, it can be interpreted that he is someone who has dreams, but could never achieve anything. It’s ironic and displays flawed reasoning in how he kidnaps his daughter from the hospital, but then tells her that “she’s safe” and that she “doesn’t have to worry anymore.”(Walls, 14) She then goes on and talks about her father’s stories. He talks about “stories” of his past, which is inferred that in realty, they’re really just fiction. The way Wall’s dad portrays himself symbolizes his need to have his children believe in him, to prove that he can still be strong and intelligent-not the drunk that he is-, to describe what he wants his life to be. Walls explains to her audience why her childhood was troubled through using parallelism, she said that her and her family didn’t fit in “because they had red hair, because dad was a drunk, because we wore rags and didn’t take baths…..” (Walls, 164) In this passage, Wall’s uses simple words, easy to understand diction, and clearly tells us her story. Even though it may not be the best experiences a child can endure, she doesn’t complain, but simply looks at it as something that she has overcome. Jeannette Walls wrote a story about her life, her parents, her upbringing, and she did so calmly and objective, yet still connecting with her readers on an emotional…
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities. This is evident in Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, which reiterates the story of Jeannette who is raised within a family that is both deeply dysfunctional and distinctively vibrant. Jeannette is faced with numerous barriers throughout her life. Despite the many obstacles set forth by her parents during her childhood, Jeannette develops into a successful adult later in life. One of these obstacles is the lack of a stable home base moulds her into the woman she grows up to be. Throughout her life, Jeannette must cope with the carelessness of her mother, Rose Mary, while also dealing with the destructive nature of her father, Rex.…
A. Jeannette Walls, in her memoir The Glass Castle, demonstrates Erikson’s eight stages of development. Through the carefully recounted stories of her childhood and adolescence, we are able to trace her development from one stage to the next. While Walls struggles through some of the early developmental stages, she inevitably succeeds and has positive outcomes through adulthood. The memoir itself is not only the proof that she is successful and productive in middle adulthood, but the memoir may also have been part of her healing process. Writing is often a release and in writing her memoir and remembering her history, she may have been able to come to terms with her sad past. The memoir embodies both the proof that she has successfully graduated through Erickson’s stages of development while also being the reason that she is able to do so.…
This story is about Jeannette Walls and how her family must travel and live in poverty. She had to live in rundown houses and sometimes didn’t have a house at all, at one point she had to live the wild desert and wrote about how she loved to sleep under the stars. Her dad throughout her life was an alcoholic and would disappear for days at a time and would come home and verbally abuse the wife and sometimes children.…
Throughout the book, Jeannette has gone through much adversity and has overcome almost impossible odds. However there was a price to much of what happened. The Walls children were neglected and beaten, and were raised by alcoholic and selfish parents. Yet, after all the strife and turmoil, Jeannette forgave them. She still doesn’t see them as parents now that she is older and can reflect more on her childhood in a more mature way. As they grew up, the horrors the children faced got worse. They faced racism, sexual, verbal, and physical abuse, neglect, and poverty.…
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is a memoir of Walls’s life where she reflects on events throughout her life that made her who she is. In the beginning, Walls is in a taxi in New York City, when she looks out the window to see her homeless mother scavenging for useful items in a dumpster. It is then Walls gets ahold of her mother to meet for dinner, which prompts the beginning of the recollection of her life. The first event Walls recalls is when she was three and set herself on fire while cooking hotdogs. Her parents reluctantly bring her to the hospital where Walls stays a few days until her father, Rex Walls, takes her on the “great skedaddle” and rushes Walls out of the hospital to the running car waiting outside and drives back home.…
Rex Walls was the unconventional father due to the occasional endangerment of his children. People think he’s an unfit parent. However, Rex was a loving, caring father who teaches his kids important values, with many positive parenting traits who just messes up from time to time. Rex cares when he gives his kids stars for Christmas because he doesn’t have money for toys. Rex says, “Years from now, when all the junk [the other kids] got is broken and long forgotten, you’ll still have your stars” (Walls 41). Rex was almost always positive about negative things. He always liked to look at situations as adventures instead of troubles. Giving his children stars when money’s tight is a good example of trying to be positive about something negative. When Rex woke them all up in the middle of the night and told them they had to leave, he would make it sound adventurous. He would say that the FBI or the Mafia was after them. When they spent the night in the desert and didn’t have pillows, Rex told them it was part of his plan to get them to have good posture. He said, “The Indians didn’t use pillows . . . and look how straight they stood.” (18). Another example of both a positive parenting trait and turning things into an adventure is shown on pages 36-37 when Jeannette says there’s a monster under the bed. When told about a monster under the bed Rex turned it into an adventure. He made up a…
A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle, an aircraft, without a human pilot on board. Its flight is controlled by a pilot on the ground or in another vehicle. These drones are used for remote sensing, commercial aerial surveillance, domestic policing, transport, scientific research, armed attacks, search and rescue, etc. The most controversial use, however, is armed attack.…
Jeannette was sitting in a taxi, when she saw her homeless mother cover in rags, searching through the garbage. Jeannette was felt ashamed of her mother and ended up going back to her home on Park Avenue. Jeannette feels guilty that she is the reason her parents are homeless and she is being spoiled with all these luxuries however, her mother and father reject all of Jeannette’s offers. The only way she can get a hold of her mother is if she called up a friend of hers. The next day Jeanette and her mother met up at a local restaurant for lunch. Jeannette informed her mother that she is worried about her. In all seriousness, her mother asks for an electrolysis treatment and that she should also accept her parents as they are because that is who they were and they were never going to change. This part of the book introduces Jeannette as an adult and her mother who is homeless. I don’t blame Jeannette for feeling ashamed, she is living on Park Avenue yet her parents are living on the street. Her mother’s comments toward Jeannette prove that she is very happy the way she is and doesn’t want to change.…