Overcoming Obstacles In Booker T. Washington's The Glass Castle

Earlier this year, I read Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle. The Glass Castle tells the story of Walls and her siblings as they experience an impoverished childhood and attempt to escape the poverty-stricken lives of their parents. In her descriptions of her life and the lives of her family members, Walls influenced my ideas about poverty, homelessness, and escaping hard lives.

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

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.

Writer, Jeannette Walls, in her memoir, The Glass Castle, provides an insight into the fanciful and shocking life of growing up poor and nomadic with faux-grandiose parents in America. With her memoir, Wall's purpose was to acknowledge and overcome the difficulties that came with her unusual upbringing. Her nostalgic but bitter tone leaves the reader with an odd taste in their mouth. In some memories, the author invites her audience to look back on with fondness; others are viewed through bulletproof glass and outrage.

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.

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

In her novel The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls discusses social problems that people deal with daily. One of the most basic issue we deal with every day is the kind of parents we want to be and the things we feel are the most important to teach our children. The lessons learned in childhood is eventually what shapes a person’s moral and values as they mature into an adult. Walls’ memoir enables us to see how Rex and Rosemary Walls choose to teach their children to see the positive side of their problems. The Walls teach their children that no matte the circumstances tosses at them, they can shoulder the burden. Rex and Rosemary Wells may not be considered good parent, and probably not even mediocre parents today, but their children turned into well-educated adults.

According to a 2017 study done by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, “More than 10 percent of U.S. children live with a parent with alcohol problems.” The author Jeannette Walls uses the book, The Glass Castle, to talk about her childhood struggles of growing up with an alcoholic father. The reason this book was appealing was because I grew up with an alcoholic father as well and I found it interesting to read about someone who had gone through similar situations. In the first 90 pages the author tells us about her chaotic family life. Her father, who is weary of civilization and authority, packs up the family camp often to roam around the desert. Due to their frequent moving her father is not able to keep a stable job,

Too often, society measures success by wealth, power, and status. In American society, those favored by pop culture like the Kardashians tend to wield more influence than rocket scientists or brain surgeons. Acting as a major determining factor of how success is perceived, power often trumps attributes such as intelligence and determination. However, Booker T. Washington firmly disagreed. He posited that how far a person advances and how many obstacles he overcomes should determine success. While Washington’s reasoning is valid in theory, the position one has achieved remains ultimately more significant in certain facets of life.

Different circumstances shape people into who they will become. This is relevant in both books, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle. Both the Joad and Walls families faced adversities but made it through them stronger. The two families move from place to place and greatly struggled financially. The value of family and lessons that can be learned from them is prevalent in both novels. The attributes that enabled both the Joad and Walls families to endure in the face of adversities are perseverance, faith, and their devotion to each other.

In Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, there are many important themes that pop throughout the book. Although there are many themes, the most essential one is how a hard past forces people to learn to rely on themselves to make their life better by pushing through their struggles, this changes how a person thinks and acts ultimately defining their identity. This theme is the most prominent throughout the book.

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.

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

As Jeannette grows up her relationship with her parents, especially as her father starts to dwindle. Jeannette didn’t realize that the way her parents were going about taking care of them wasn’t normal. As Jeannette started to age she realized how inconsiderate her parents really were, Mary and Rex had forced their children to move around the country leaving the kids hungry and alone countless nights. Jeannette was always close with her father, and always had sympathy for him. However, when they moved to Welch it seemed as though her father had completely changed. Jeannette had started to work to save up money so her and her siblings could live, but her father did not respect that. One day Rex went up to Jeannette when no one was home and simply said “’Hon, I need some money.’”(209) Jeannette would have gladly given him the money, but it was for beer and cigarettes. This made Jeannette feel like he had no regard for her at all. Rex did not care enough to find his own way of getting money for his addictions, let alone provide food for his family. Jeannette agreed to give him the money, and he agreed to pay her back, but when he wanted to pay her back, Jeannette was staring to realize how sickening her father really is.

Writer, Jeannette Walls, in her memoir, The Glass Castle, provides an insight into the fanciful and shocking life of growing up poor and nomadic with faux-grandiose parents in America. With her memoir, Wall's purpose was to acknowledge and overcome the difficulties that came with her unusual upbringing. Her nostalgic but bitter tone leaves the reader with an odd taste in their mouth. In some memories, the author invites her audience to look back on with fondness; others are viewed through bulletproof glass and outrage.