Obstacles In The Glass Castle

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

The Glass Castle's Themes Everybody has someone who has raised them, and the results of how someone was raised whether it be good or bad can result in how the child ends up as an adult. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls has to deal with a lot of things growing up such as Peculiar Parenting Styles, alcoholism, and living in poverty. Because of the things she had to go through growing up, it made her self-reliant and very independent. Sometimes though, many kids dealing with such harsh living conditions may have an opposite effect on people such as Jeanette's sister, Maureen.

American journalist, writer, and magazine editor David Remnick once said, “The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy.” In the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls the main character and author of the book tells of her crazy and adventurous life she experienced with her not so ordinary family. This quote relates to The Glass Castle, because like it states, life is full of both tragedies and beauty which is exactly what Jeannette experienced growing up with her free spirited and non-conformative parents. Walls is able to express her main purpose of the book that life is a mix of good and bad times through imagery, tone, and pathos.

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

The Glass Castle is a book written by Jeannette Walls and is about her childhood growing up in the 1960s and 70s. Throughout the book, Jeannette shows that money does not determine happiness. At various points in her difficult life, she is happy with only the essentials. Jeanette feels she is rich in her family for many reasons. They also teach her to be strong and resilient and give her something to look forward to. Jeannette sees wealth as being subjective, and as an adult, feels guilty for having money when her parents do not. In the end, Jeannette realizes it's her family and their perseverance that determine happiness.

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.

“I’m thankful for my struggles because without it I wouldn’t have stumbled across my strength.” Through the eyes of Alex Elle you first must struggle in order to find your true strengths. An obstacle that most of us deal with throughout our lives. Some, more extreme than the other, regardless having the power to lift us as humans or tear us down. These crossroads are formed at different points and for different reasons in each person's life, nevertheless morphing them into the people they will soon become. Along with struggle comes forgiveness. Allowing yourself to let go of the things that cause you the pain and struggle in order to move on. Giving yourself the opportunity to wipe your slate clean and start fresh. Throughout Flight,

“Life with your father was never boring.” – Rose Mary Walls. Rose Mary Walls, Jeannette Walls’s mother and Rex Walls’s spouse, reminisces life with Rex, which included migrating frequently, refusing to conform, and advocating self-sufficiency. Despite Rose Mary finding Rex disdainful at times, she still believes that being with Rex was an adventure. In Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Walls reveals that there are turbulence and order in life, the influence of family, and how she develops as she grows up through Walls’s recollection of her life, from living in a nomadic household, where her parents neglect their children, to living in a squalid hovel with no plumbing, and finally living in New York City, where she is employed as a journalist.

The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls, giving the public a look at her rough upbringing and her nomadic childhood. The memoir, however is written in a way of which the author is not seeking sympathy from the reader. She also wrote in such a way as to not induce anger in the reader, as that is not what she was searching for. Jeannette wrote in order to inform and inspire, and to tell a tale as crazy as it is. Jeannette grew up, one of four siblings. Her parents had alternate methods of parenting and different ideas of how children should be raised. They taught them to have similar morals to them, and similar values. Although, as the children age, they begin to realize how wrong their parents are, and how

In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls tells the story of her childhood and describes her life in poverty. She had experienced what injustice was first hand. Her father, Rex, was an alcoholic that spent all of their money on booze. Because of this, they never had any money to spend on a house or food. They were always moving because they did not pay their bills and were running away from their problems. Her mother, Rose Mary, was irresponsible and only thought about herself. She refused to get a job and when she did, her kids had to drag her out of bed every morning. She did not watch her children and she let them do whatever they wanted. This caused the children to get into trouble with other kids and even adults. She spent money on useless commodities and could not afford to buy her starving children any food. Every day, the children had to rummage through the trash to find food to eat. When Jeannette finally realized she did not want to live with injustice anymore she left. It was very hard for her father to watch her go but she did not look back. She started focusing on the future and became a successful journalist. This was one of the many ways she gained her justice back. She offered to help her parents by buying them clothes and offering them money. She was trying to make everything just again by giving her parents what they never gave to her. Her parents never took any of her gifts because they saw it as charity and did not appreciate it. The injustice that happened to Jeannette made her who she is today. If she did not go through all of those injustices, she might not have realized that her passion in life was to write. It has made her a better person and she can now help others going through the same thing through her writings.

Through The Glass Castle, Jeannette shows the world how an impoverished, neglected girl grows into a successful author and wife. Jeanette, herself, is a living proof of ultimate success showing the world that no matter what situation you come from, ultimate success is completely possible. She starts out with memories from the time when she was as young as three along with the rest of her family, constantly on the move, deserted towns in the middle of the night "Rex Walls ' style” and lived in numerous places, all the way up to her present-day. Throughout her life, Jeanette dealt with poverty, hunger, malnourishment, along with an alcoholic father and an unstable mother. But for Jeanette, the

As I read the Glass Castle, the way Rose Mary behaves, thinks and feels vary greatly and differently throughout the memoir. The immediate question that pops up in my mind is to ask whether Rose Mary carries some sort of mental illness. Fortunately, given the hints and traits that are relevant to why Rose Mary lives like that in the memoir, we, the readers, are able to make some diagnosis and assumptions on the kind of mental illness she may carry. To illustrate, one distinctive example is when Rose Mary blames Jeannette for having the idea to accept welfare. “Once you go on welfare, it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case.” (188). In my opinion, Rose Mary is being nonsense and

In The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls was faced with many life changing and hard obstacles. Many people who have read this book think that these hardships have helped her later in life. Her parents were never there for her when she was growing up. Her dad was a raging alcoholic who spent all of his money away at the bars. Her mom was intelligent, but still never seemed to help much with Jeanette and her siblings. Even though her parents were not much help, she loved them the same no matter what. When Jeanette was younger, she was constantly bullied at her new schools, but never went home and told on the kids her had beat her up. She stood up for herself even if she knew she had no chance at winning the fight. This showed how brave and strong

By constantly moving around, Jeanette’s childhood was characterized by its instability and her own dependence on herself in order to survive the negligence of her parents. The glass castle symbolized a place where the Walls’ family would finally settle and become free of governmental intervention, however, it was through Jeanette’s realization that individualism was the underlying issue to her family’s problems, that she became aware of the impracticalness of being self-reliant. While Jeanette did have faith in her parents, her father’s continual inability to support his family and her mother’s own carelessness for her children, eroded all of Jeanette’s confidence. Jeanette’s decision to move to New York was not fueled by a need for individualism, however, it was in fact her desire to return to society and reintegrate into a world where she would be able to interact with other people. Thus, Jeanette's return to society signified her dependence of others and shows how individualism can never solve all of people's

*One of the themes of “The Glass Castle” is that, although you might have a horrible and hard childhood, it doesn’t mean you’ll stay that way. Jeannette had gone through so many things, but because she tried her very best to get out of her struggle she now succeeds in life.