Resilience In The Glass Castle

Resilience, when asked to define and explain the act of being resilient, can be a hard thing to describe. It is something everyone must be at one point in their lives, and what some people must be every day. There are different levels to it, depending on what the person is going through at the time. However, resilience is commonly described as just staying strong in a tough situation or time in a person’s life. When something goes wrong, or something bad happens, the person affected doesn’t let it break them. They stand strong against whatever is being thrown at them, but they bend when they need to. Someone who is resilient is flexible, making sure they don’t crack under pressure. As Robert Jordan said in The Fires of Heaven, “The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”

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.

For some people the strong word resilience can impact one’s life in a significant way. Overall, resiliency is having the ability to still enjoy and continue your life with positive, good times, regardless of a hard past or bad experience. It can be shown in various ways throughout a text, including the setting, the plot, and characterization. This is how the texts, The Other Wes Moore, The Art of Resilience, and The Third and Final Continent share their common theme. This theme the three texts convey is that resiliency is vital for a positive as well as successful life.

Resilience is the power or the ability to return to the original form. “Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range” (94). Father Gregory Boyle says this because he knows that resilience is needed in order to change. Resilience is important because we can become better people by doing things, we thought we couldn’t do. In the book, Tattoos on the Heart, The Power of Boundless Compassion, by Father Gregory Boyle, resilience is essential in our lives because it is the key to do better.

The memoir The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls, takes the reader on her life journey as a child and how her family represents resilience. But, what exactly does it mean to be resilient? Resilience is the capability of a person to bounce back from a hard time, to get back on their feet after stumbling, to understand that there is no end and you can always become better. This essay will model the explanation of resilience in my words, the explanation of resilience from both what was seen in the memoir and Elizabeth Edwards, and how these three tie together to model the same title; resilience.

Reading a book that is similar to The Glass Castle by Jeannette wall can help build a student’s resilience especially if that student is in a tough moment in his/her life. The article The Importance Of Resilience has some what similar problems like The Glass Castle. In the article the author discussed, about a man named Quashone. When Quashone was younger he lived in a bad neighborhood, from living there it lead to some bad decisions that he made. After telling his mom, those bad decisions they moved to a different neighborhood (Gorman, et al). Just by that one change in his life, it turned upside down from getting into trouble to graduating from college and having a family of his own. From reading books that are like The Glass Castle it can teach people, especially students, on how to build resilience accepting support, drive, and hard work.

In the novel The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls there are many moments in which you notice the struggle that the family and family are going through. By constructing this response to the proposed question; it forces you to look deeper into the stories character and see their resilience. Now of course in this novel there were characters that showed very little resilience or never sprung back from the situation they were in at a younger age. In this essay I will be explaining resilience and use examples from The Glass Castle to prove my points.

Resilience is the power or the ability to return to the original form. “Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range” (94). Father Gregory Boyle says this because he knows that resilience is needed in order to change. Resilience is important because we can become better people by doing things, we thought we couldn’t do. In the book, Tattoos on the Heart, The Power of Boundless Compassion, Boyle claims resilience is essential in our lives because it is the key to do better.

In order to build up resilience, a student must learn to support themselves and seek support from others. A student that supports themselves can lead themselves into a better future because they are learning through experience. For example, Lori in The Glass Castle wanted to get out of West Virginia and move to New York. She was tired of living in a house that had no food, no running water, and was falling apart. Lori believed that she could save enough money for herself so that she could go live in New York. Unfortunately, her father took the money that they earned to move to New York. An unexpected opportunity opened up for Jeannette that would get her sister out of West Virginia (Walls 218). They both got jobs to support the destination they were planning to go. This shows that when a student supports themselves they can accomplish the goals that they have set for themselves, like how Lori and

Accused of only knowing the struggles of a privileged life, Walls does not defend herself in a situation where she strongly could have. Walls reasoning behind this could have been that she did not want to be defined by the difficulties she overcame in order to get to where she was. Akin to the joshua tree the author sees in the beginning pages of the book, Walls may have seen something wrong with showing the struggle she endured, just the same way she did when she saw the tree for the first time.

The purpose of this paper is to define the concept of resilience using Wilson’s concept analysis. Wilsons method was developed expressly for students to develop the abiity to “gain skills in answering questions of a conceptual nature.” (Walker & Advant 2011, p. 55) The process he developed provides the necessary structure for the development of a concept without being overly laborious in process. It is meant to assist the user in “clear thinking and communitcation”. (2011, p. 55). It uses the process of question isolation: deciding on a concept to address, finding right answers or researching meaning of the concept to be investigated, example cases in which this paper will only identify a model case, social context in which the concept

“I was three years old...stirring the hot dogs,... Then the flames leaped up, reaching my face.” This scene represents that this incredibly young girl is willing to take risks and take the responsibility of cooking her own food into her own hands without parental supervision. Furthermore, Jeannette Wall’s earliest memory caused a lot of traumatization and at such a young age, she almost experienced a life-death situation. As readers, it's easy to grasp the idea that this incident evidently shows how dysfunctional this family is. The Glass Castle is written by Jeannette walls and it tells a story of the life of Jeannette and her family. In her memoir, the four Walls siblings learn to live life differently than most typical children while their “excitement addict” mother and alcoholic father manipulate them that they’re living the life of their dreams as a distraction to their financial crisis. To elaborate, the Walls are frequently short on cash to the point where the family has to “skedaddle” every so often around the country to escape from the bill collectors. Jeanette’s identify is influenced by her parents’ actions, performances, and decisions, which leads her to be a more intelligent, self-conscious, and independent individual.

Could living a miserable childhood actually beneficial? The Glass Castle is a novel written about the life of the narrator and author, Jeanette Walls. The story illustrates the hardships and experiences of an alcoholic father and delusional mother attempting to raise four children. Jeanette Walls owes her success to her hardships and became the women she is today because of her parents and childhood.

After reading the first 28 pages of the The Glass Castle one question I have is, why was Jeannette’s family homeless because in the book it seemed like her father was very intelligent and could have a well paying job. The author stated in the book that her father was very good at math and electricity despite having never earned a college degree. Another question I have about the text is why did her father dislike hospitals so much and preferred the care of a “witch” doctor? Could it be religious beliefs or simply the cost of medical treatment. I have this question because in the text the author said how her father carried her out of the hospital after about six weeks and ran out the door. Prior to this, her father also had some arguments with

First of all, I would like to define what resilience is. Major scholars believe it is the process to recover from trauma, or the ability to respond to adversity. According to Sergeant and Laws-Chapman (2012), resilience refers to “the ability to adapt to adverse conditions while maintaining a sense of purpose, balance, and positive mental and