A Summary Of The Injury In The Glass Castle

Imagine living in a life where everything around you is different from reality. Imagine running from the police, living wherever one can find, and still taking care of one's family just at the age of 16. Jeannette Walls had to deal with all of this and more in her early childhood. In the book “The Glass Castle”, the author uses the characters, Jeannette and Rex Walls, to emphasize the importance of family bonds.

Author Jeanette Walls is an example of someone who has preserved and made something of herself despite the fact that she has a less-than-normal childhood. Her parents Rose Mary and Rex Walls struggled at time to parent efficiently, as shown in Jeannette Walls’ memoir of her childhood The Glass Castle. In the recalling of her unique and sometimes disturbing childhood, Walls paints a picture of inadequate parenting, dangerous techniques used on her siblings and herself, and events that may have inflicted permanent damage on the Walls children. Not only Jeannette, but her other siblings Brian, Lori, and Maureen Walls were also negatively affected by the way they were raised and the things that happened to them under their parent’s watch. Rose

Jeannette Walls, Shows in the book The Glass Castle that there are a lot of situations that happen in life where people make countless mistakes, but it is very important to forgive her father and her mother for many mistakes. She has to cope with many obstacles without her parent's help. In the author's memoir, we become attracted with Jeannette constant struggle between protecting her family and the pleasure that her family is based on the same hopes and senseless falsehood with her unbelievable storytelling method. The feelings of forgiveness hold the Walls family together. Jeanette was able to describe her family's childhood, relationships with one another. The children of the Walls family are forced to begin the independent life at an

While she is in the hospital, her mother does not stay with her. Instead she visits a few times and gives her oranges, seeming to be disappointed in the fact that it is an illness. At this point in the story, the reader can begin to feel sorry for young Jeanette. She is left all alone in the hospital while her mother is busy helping the church. Jeanette wants to be a missionary, just like in the stories her mom has read to her. In the beginning of the book, it appears that Jeanette’s mother does love her. However, it appears that she only loves her based on if she fulfills her expectations or not.

Colson Whitehead once said, “Let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things”. In the memoir “The Glass Castle,” author Jeannette Walls faces despair and turmoil as a result of her impoverished and dysfunctional upbringing. As Jeannette grows up, she watches her father Rex fail to reach his full potential and his dream to build a Glass Castle shatter as his alcoholism takes control. Aware of the devastation her father was causing, she begins to slowly lose faith in him but doesn’t fail to escape her destructive household and pursue her dreams of becoming a journalist. Due to her parent’s lack of parenting and being forced to fend for herself, Jeannette developed a sense of responsibility to care for others and make amends to improve the family’s lifestyle. Despite the turbulence and destruction her parents had caused over the years, unlike her father, Jeannette was able to find the strength to overcome obstacles, developing characteristics that ultimately lead her to achieving her dream, thus illustrating that adversity has the power to shape one’s identity.

Most often, in most families, children look up to their parents for guidance as children view their parents as role models. However in The Glass Castle, this was not the case but the exact opposite.

I turned to see where it was coming from and realized my dress was on fire. Frozen with fear, I watched the yellow-white flames make a ragged brown line up the pink fabric of my skirt and climb my stomach” (Walls 9). Immediately, Jeannette’s mother rushes her to hospital and underwent a skin graft to ensure her survival. In today’s society, a young child cooking a hotdog is very scary and most parents will not allow it out of fear of what happened to Jeannette. The fact that her first memory is one that Jeannette feels fear and happens to be a memory that is on the other side of fear, danger, is important. Her life foreseen by her first memory is also filled with danger; yet, she does not have to view them as dangerous ones with fear. Due to the fact that these memories are from a perspective of fear leads her story to have a theme of fear.

People often fall into some sticky situations, but how they deal with them is the thing that matters most. In The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls, she takes the readers through her life, starting at her earliest memory as a three-year-old, constantly living in a state of homelessness. Throughout the story, Walls experiences countless situations from her father being an alcoholic, to everyday school bullies. She uses a series of coping mechanisms to deal with, and sometimes terminate these issues. In fact, everyone of her siblings and parents uses various coping methods for these same situations. These methods may not always be the most effective, but people, including the Walls family, nevertheless use them to get by on their

Jeannette Walls earliest memory is burning herself cooking hot dogs. At age 3 she was so hungry she stood over the stove in a tutu to cook for her mom and herself, while her mom was busy painting. After catching on fire Jeannette was burned

As flames engulfed her dress, they burned down her stomach as she screamed for help. This was the first memory Jeannette Walls had in The Glass Castle . The plot of the story reveals her childhood of poverty as she moved around the country with her delusional family. Her alcoholic father and mentally ill mother created a very different lifestyle for their children, and raised them like no other. The unique plot, strong characters, and many settings make the novel successful. In this autobiography, she perseveres through tough times and leads the reader down the path she took to adulthood.

Jeanette’s father is a man that is extremely smart in science and math, and an amazing storyteller, however he drinks/smokes way too much and can be very abusive. Her mother is a religious and tough woman, who could live with basically any situation and will go through with something until it is done. Jeanette’s tone to her parents, however, is not of happiness, but instead sadness, because of the father’s behaviors, and her mother’s stubbornness to stay with him. The tone towards their actions from Jeanette is dismay, because for almost all of their actions, both her mother and father don’t think about the consequences before they

It can be seen that both Rex, and Rose Mary Walls did not like receiving any type of help, even if it would greatly benefit the family. At the beginning of the book, Jeannette burns herself while cooking hotdogs. One sign of negligence from Rose Mary was that she let Jeannette cook by herself at the age of 3, with absolutely no supervision, and this caused Jeannette to accidently burn herself severely. She was in the hospital for a few weeks, and due to the parent’s discontent with receiving help, they decided to steal Jeannette out of the hospital before she was cleared to leave. Jeannette explains, “Dad hurried down the hall with me in his arms. A nurse yelled for us to stop, but Dad broke into a run. He pushed open an emergency exit door and sprinted down the stairs and out to the street” (Walls 9). Firstly, Rex is not being a good role model to his three year old daughter as he is doing something that is completely forbidden. A responsible parent would not be teaching their children that actions such as these are acceptable. Jeannette was only three, and therefore the encouragement to break rules would stick to her mind a lot easier. Also, what was Rex thinking when he decided to steal Jeannette from the hospital prematurely? They brought Jeannette to the hospital for her to recover from her injury (which could have been prevented with parent supervision). Hospitals are there to help patients, and that is exactly how it benefitted Jeannette. If there were a reason for this, it might have been understandable. However, Rex did not have a valid reason for this as it was not like he was going to help Jeannette recover at home. Not only did the parents not like help from other people, but they did not like any type of aid to their family at all. This can be seen when Jeannette explains,” ‘Nosiree,’ Mom said. She didn't approve of glasses. If you had weak eyes, Mom

At the early age of 3, she began forgiving her mother for the way she treated her, always neglecting her children. Her mother refers to a saddle as an analogy saying that if falling off the horse, it shouldn’t stop a person from riding horses. Similarly, even if she burned herself from cooking, she shouldn’t stop doing that. As faulty as her mother was, Jeanette's extremely strong mind made her braver and more courageous through the tragedies. Despite the hardships, she walked through life optimistically no matter the circumstance. She forced herself to have complete faith in her parents. When Jeanette’s dad threw her into a pool to teach her to swim, she thought to herself, “I figured he must be right, there was no other way to explain it” (66). Rex put his daughter in a life or death situation. Although she was extremely nervous, her attitude towards the end was incredibly optimistic, forcing herself to believe that her dad was right without doubt. She doesn’t let herself experience pity and depression for being born into a unfortunate family, she hopefully searched for the sliver of light at the end of the dark tunnel. Although Jeanette went through a lot growing up, in the end when her dad is sick and in

In the memoir “The Glass Castle,” by Jeannette Walls, the author describes the childhood she was apart of with her uninvolved parents was somewhat disparate from what other children would experience in their childhood involving their parents.

He acts foolishly and says mean things when they attend the midnight mass. On the way home from the midnight mass, he says things to Jeannette that made her feel uncomfortable towards him. When they got home, her father sets the Christmas tree on fire and laughs the whole time. Jeannette gets upset because “he’d ruining the Christmas his family had spent weeks planning” (Walls 115). This incident signifies a turning point in Jeannette’s life because from her point of view, her father is a role model to her. However, after seeing her father behave this way, she begins to have second