preview

Summary Of The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

Decent Essays

The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls. In the tells the story of her and her family. Although she doesn’t explicitly condemn the state of her family to the level of dysfunctional, based on the story it would be illogical to call it anything else. For most of the novel, Walls’ family spend their migrating through numerous mining towns, they very rarely settle down and when they did it was only temporarily. Jeannette Walls along with her three other siblings; Lori, Brian and Maureen Walls were never graced with the opportunity to grow up in a stable home. It wasn’t because of their family’s economic status; the blame is on their parents. Their father is Rex Walls, who’s not only a drunk but suffers from insecurity and hypermasculinity …show more content…

Rex was bad enough parent on his own, but couple with his delusional, selfish and negligent wife, Rose Mary Walls, he was even worst. Under the leadership Rex and Rose Walls, their family was always placed in disadvantageous positions because their decisions or the lack thereof.
Context

The inability of Rex and Rose Walls to keep a stable job led to the family living in inescapable cycle of poverty for most of Jeannette Walls’ childhood. Walls’ grew up in “traditional” or “nuclear family,” where there was a husband and a wife (Moore & Asay, 2018, p. 23). They also maintained the structure of a “modern family” where Rex was usually the “breadwinner,” and Rose was the housewife (Moore & Asay, 2018, p. 23). This structure of their family was ineffective because Rex Walls couldn’t keep a job so as result, the family was constantly lacked capital to buy the resources that they needed. This led to a …show more content…

In the beginning of the novel, she is wild and adventurous, she’s also her father’s favorite because she hangs at his every word. She thinks he’s perfect, with n shortcomings and nothing he does shakes that view of him. It feeds right his ego to see his favorite daughter view him so highly. As a child, Walls’ didn’t see anything wrong with the state her family was in. Because of her being a child she’s innocent and ignorant to the truth about the wretched state of he family. She doesn’t even realize that the reason she was burned as a child was because of a mother’s laziness and inattentiveness. She ignorant to the fact that a child isn’t supposed to operating a stove, regardless of their intelligence level. As a child or she wants his for her father to find the gold and build the glass castle, he’s always rambling on about. She’s clueless to how improbable it is for him to find gold or even the lack of technology at the time for him to be able to construct a house that was solely powered solar panels, in the middle of the desert. As she gets older and interacts with more people outside of her family, including classmates, she begins to see the cracks in what she thought was the perfect life. She begins to see how detrimental her father’s drinking is to the family. Money that could be used to spend on food or

Get Access