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
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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
Parenting has always been an issue since the brick of dawn and recently been recognized as a problem for our society: remarkably people have finally decided to try to do something about it. In the Glass Castle, Rex and Rose Mary Walls went through many struggles raising their children but ultimately the struggles made the children stronger individuals; despite the alcoholism, sickness, and domestic abuse. Jeanette and her siblings have been through many
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 main idea of the book was no matter what happens family stick together. This is the story of Jeannette Walls life told by Jeannette Walls. The title The Glass Castle was a dream the at Rex Walls planned to give the family a mansion in the dessert and call it the glass castle after he found gold. Jeannette’s family consisted of Father and Mother, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, and three siblings (Lori, Brian, Maureen).
Have you ever heard of a family nowadays that are constantly on the move, frequently traveling throughout our country, stopping to live in one place for a couple months, then leaving for another place for a similar amount of time and doing that constantly? The Walls are a family that does do that. In the entertaining book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a young girl named Jeannette Walls learns how to become successful in life through constantly being on the move. She lived with her with her parents and her siblings. Her parents, Rex and Rose Mary would be in a huge fight one minute, then would be hugging each other the next, which made it hard for the kids to grow up. Throughout Jeannette’s unusual childhood, she learned to have acceptance
Jeannette Walls is an American writer in journalist who found success in New York City, most notably writing a gossip column for MSNBC in which she details the effects of gossip in politics. She published her memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005. The book spent 261 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In it, Walls recounts her childhood while growing up in an unstable family with her father and mother, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori, and her younger brother and sister, Brian and Maureen. Rex and Rose Mary could not settle down and constantly uprooted their family of six to different locations in the southwest region of America. Neither parent could keep a job and struggled to feed and put a roof over their heads. In the novel, Walls views her parents as irresponsible because it rarely seems as though Rex and Rose Mary genuinely want to work and make money to support the family. They thrive off their sense of adventure, as they drive all over the country in a rundown car, looking for their latest shack to pile their family into, usually without running water, heat, or indoor plumbing. Walls will tell the story of her childhood through a series of pivotal moments that ultimately shape her opinion of her parents and lead her to a successful career in New York City.
Author, Jeannette Walls, in her novel, The Glass Castle, from pages 226 to 230, exemplifies the themes of escapism and betrayal. In this chapter, Walls’s purpose is to identify the instability that her family is going through. Through her diction, Walls creates various tones in order to convey to her audience that despite obstacles, it is possible to escape from a dysfunctional family in hopes of a brighter future. Walls begins the chapter by recalling incidents of disappointment.
The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls, tells the story of Jeannette's upbringing and her road to adulthood. Jeannette, and her siblings, were raised by dysfunctional, poor, and sometimes homeless parents, Rose Mary and Rex Walls. The Walls children were pretty much abandoned by their parents and in some cases they were forced into making their own money, or stealing food just so they would not starve. Rose Mary and Rex Walls allowed the children to do anything they wanted, whenever they wanted to do it, but that did not stop Jeannette from being successful. She recognized that she did not want to live her life the same way her parents have lived their lives. In The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls believes that sometimes people are actually
One consequence, for example, showed Walls's parents trying so hard to separate themselves from society itself, that they didn't focus their attention on what's most important: their children, which in return showed the Walls family to be dysfunctional. They were constantly running away, always having problems with finances, which eventually resulted in scarce food and no working electricity. Although Jeannette Walls's parents earned
In her memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls explains all the hardships she faced when growing up. Walls unfortunately had deleterious parents and this caused her to lose her childhood innocence quickly. Jeannette Walls, along with her siblings: Lori, Brian, and Maureen, all had to find ways to ultimately care and protect themselves.
Walls’s father spent too much money on alcohol while her mother was too infatuated with the idea of becoming an artist. Because of of her parent’s values, she and her siblings were able to get away with fighting and other mischievous activities. For example, during the episode Billy was in, Walls and her sister fired a gun at Billy in self-defence. If their parents were only there, this could have been prevented. Also, because of her parent’s values, Walls and her siblings had to work so that they can continue living in their home. This all could have been avoided if the family worked all together to support each other and set rules for one another such as not spending a lot of money at the
Jeannette Walls, the author of The Glass Castle, creates an overall universal message, or theme, that family is more important than money because family lasts forever; She does this by including the fact that the mom didn’t sell family owned land just for money. The Walls family lives a run-down life moving from place to place practically homeless. Towards the end of the memoir, a big secret is revealed: the mother, Rose Mary Walls, inherited land valued at about one million dollars, but instead of selling this land for money she decides to keep it and rent it out for a little extra money. A million dollars would be great to have and could provide Rose Mary’s children, Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen, with healthy food, a nice home, and
During her cab ride she sees a woman digging through trash only to realize it’s her mother picking through a dumpster. Her mother analyzes through items she finds, and smiles when something strikes her appeal. After watching for a while, Jeannette tells the driver to take her back to her apartment. The first section of Jeannette Walls' memoir establishes the theme of class differences and introduces two very important characters, her parents Rose Mary and Rex Walls. First, in the opening scene in which the author, Jeannette Walls spots her mother digging through a dumpster, the class distinctions between them are immediately apparent.
In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeannette Walls and her family struggle day by day short on cash and food, constantly moving around the country trying to re-settle. Jeannette is raised by her dad, Rex Walls, and her mother, Rose Mary Walls, who force their children to learn to take care of themselves by feeding, clothing, and protecting each other. Rex Walls, the father of Jeannette, is suppose to be the role model of the family but he somehow seems to tear the family apart based on his decisions and actions. Rex Walls qualities make him a bad parent. One quality Rex walls possess that makes him a bad parent is being irresponsible.
In the memoir by Jeannette Walls, “The Glass Castle”, the author shares the bittersweet and slightly humorous story of her dysfunctional family and destitute upbringing. Walls grows up with a family that is always on the move and stricken by hunger. In the memoir, Walls writes about her memories of moving from one place to another with her eccentric mother, her alcoholic but intelligent father, and her three other siblings. Walls used language that was quickly understood to describe the happenings in the book. When I read the part where Rex brought Jeannette to a roadside bar so that he could earn the money that he owed her, I felt so disgusted and angry at the father.
“One time I saw a tiny Joshua sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me.‘You’d be destroying what makes it special,’ she said. ‘It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty’” (Jeannette, Rose Mary 38). “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls is a non-fiction memoir that discusses multiple controversial issues throughout its text. The main character Jeannette Walls writes about her life as a homeless child and her family’s day to day struggle to make ends meet. The reader learns that Jeannette’s parents