Jeannette Walls By Jeanette Walls Summary

Jeannette had a very challenging and awful childhood. Jeannette is forced to be independent and take care of herself in ways most children should not. She realizes at a young age that her life is unpredictable. Early in the memoir,

In The Glass Castle, the main character Jeannette Walls struggle with her childhood, dealing with her nomadic life, her early independence, and her complicated relationship with her parents, Rex and Rose Mary.

One of the multiple problems Jeannette faced as a child was her irresponsible mother. When most kids dream of their future, they decide what they want to be. However, Jeanette decided what she did not want to be, “I

In the first 75 pages of Jeannette Wall’s memoir, many insane events occurred. The story begins with Jeannette Walls as an adult in the car, where she sees her mom Rose Mary digging through the trash can. Jeannette talks about how she doesn't associate herself with her parents, because they are homeless. The story goes on to talk about how when Jeannette was three, she was burned while cooking hotdogs in one of her many homes. After being in the hospital for a while, Jeannette’s father Rex takes her out without the consents of the nurses and doctor. A few days after that, the family moves in the middle of the night because the dad is being chased by someone(s). This would frequently happen, and the family wouldn't stay in one place for more than a few

Jeannette Walls was a young girl that loved her crazy family. Her family was constantly moving and traveling and running away from the feds. Jeanette's family loved the desert, that's where they prefered to live most of the time. She was brave and curious and not afraid of anything. Her dad was always thinking of new places to go and or drunk and when he was drunk he would get very aggressive. Always moving around was her life. That's what they did for years and she loved it.

The book starts out as Jeannette seeing her mother on the streets of New York digging through a garbage can, and how embarrassed she is of who her mother was. But when you get to the second chapter it starts out with her earliest memory, of being on fire at just three years old. Right from those two chapters you can tell she had a crazy life as a child.

uncle was the police chief. Timothy looked just like his father, dark brown smooth messy hair, beautiful

Jeannette was an average girl, brought up in an environment where moving every few weeks was acceptable. She never had any thing stable in her life, and basically had to raise herself with the help of her brother and sister. Neither parent was loving or caring in any ways. No matter how big a struggle, they always had to act as they were living life to the fullest. Jeannette states this by saying "We were always supposed to pretend our life was one long and incredibly fun adventure." (Walls 69.) When you take a look at the abyss she was able to avoid, it should give you hope and motivate

The opening scene of the book demonstrates the current social and economic status contrasted between Jeanette and her mother. Even their relationship between the two is displayed. While sitting in a cab, Jeanette sees her mother digging through the dumpster as she happily observes the items she picks up. Jeanette on the hand hides from her so she won't be able to be seen and tells the driver to take her back home. The scene shows how the narrator views her mother due to how she lives.

family: Cholly, the father; Pauline, the mother, and Sammy, her brother. Claudia and her sister

As I read the story I could tell that this story is written in the third person. In this case Jean was not a participant in the story. The theme of the story is not obvious in the beginning of the story.

Before the Walls family moved to Welch, Rose Mary is introduced as a character, while rather eccentric, still serves as a core member of the Walls family. The very beginning of the book revolves around Jeanette’s injury and subsequent visit to the hospital after she was allowed to cook hot dogs by her mother, despite her young age of three. This introduction sets the stage for a character, while a little strange in her very relaxed ideas of parenting, seems relatively normal in all respects. As the story progresses we see more of Rose Mary, each time with a focus on her eccentric views expressed through

In addition to their father’s alcoholism, their mother exhibits severe signs of bipolar disorder, causing her to go through extreme manic and depressive episodes. Jeannette describes her mother's moods as being “happy for days on end, announcing that she decided to think only positive thoughts … But the positive thoughts would give way to negative thoughts … when that happened, Mom would refuse to get out of bed … she would lay wrapped up in blankets on the sofa bed, sobbing about how much she hated her life" (Walls 207). Because Rose Mary refuses help, her mental illness goes untreated, causing her to be a great threat to herself and her children. This undiagnosed affliction makes her vacillate between being kind and being completely disengaged from her children’s upbringing. Without either parent’s involvement, the Walls children have to fend for themselves and end up getting into extremely dangerous and traumatizing situations. Because the family is poverty-stricken and afflicted with mental illness, it is impossible to achieve the American Dream.

The development of the characters changed at an inconsistent rate throughout the memoir. Some of the characters who changed immensely were Jeannette and Maureen. Jeannette’s most drastic change was her attitude towards her parents. At the beginning, Jeannette was sympathetic towards her mother and father, but throughout the book, she became increasingly fed up with their games. Near the end, she states “I think that maybe sometimes people get the lives they want” (256). This is her way of saying that her parents choose to live in poverty without jobs, but she knows she doesn’t want to

a kind old gentleman that ends up taking care of Oliver. He is very important in the