The Glass Castle Analysis

The memoir entitled The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls is a story of the eventful life Jeannette endured growing up with her three siblings and her parents. Jeannette lived a tough life, she was constantly moving, never had nice clothes to wear, and had to grow up faster than most children. The reason for the constant struggles in Jeannette’s life led back to her parents. Her father Rex Walls was outrageous, always making spur of the moment decisions which had taken a toll on the family as a whole. He was a severe alcoholic who made way too many promises he knew he couldn’t keep. Throughout the novel, the idea of the “Glass Castle” appears quite often. The Glass Castle is

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.

According to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate for children under age 18 was 19.7 percent between 2014 and 2015. Multiple studies and research have concluded that living in poverty results in lasting damage on a child’s self-esteem. The stories these 19.7% live are very similar to The Glass Castle, a memoir that displays the underdog tale of Jeannette Walls, which shows her battles with poverty, hunger, and child neglect. All of these battles were in her quest to prosper and live the American Dream. Due to her struggles, Jeannette realizes that growing up poor takes a toll on her self-esteem. However, after enduring a past surrounded with poverty, Jeannette learns to be less self-conscious and eventually takes pride from

The Glass Castle, a memoir written by Jeannette Walls, is a story that discusses the insights of a dysfunctional, yet vibrant family. The four Walls children have two parents, Rose Mary who was an unconventional artist, and Rex who was an alcoholic father. The family travels constantly across the country, with their parents using their imagination as a distraction from their poverty. Despite the hardships the Walls family has faced, Jeanette writes her truth in order to reconcile with her past. She expresses through her story of how she has reflected upon her childhood, and how it has shaped her character in the present (The glass castle: Jeanette Walls, 2016). The majority of readers may believe that Rex Walls is an irresponsible, neglectful parent. However, Rex’s viewpoint of how he cares for Jeanette and her siblings can be portrayed as supportive, intelligent, and sensible.

Reading The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls was a journey in itself. As I dived deeper into the book everyday, I started feeling like I was apart of the Walls family, going through everything that they were experiencing. Reading about all their crazy experiences from one of the daughter's point of views, was incredibly intriguing. It is a personal memoir of her years of growing up with her alcoholic father, delusional mother, and three siblings. The book is full of hardships. The family continually suffers especially the children as they grow up. The amazing part of the book is how the kids, especially Jeanette, made good lives for themselves even when throughout their childhood they had just about nothing. Jeanette took all her struggles

In the novel The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, the uncertain future of the Walls’ children was questionable from the start. From a drunk father, to never having a steady home, the author tells of her idiosyncratic youth to describe the bitterness and longing for an ordinary childhood.

Jeanette Walls memoir, the Glass Castle, illustrates Jeanette’s unusual childhood caused by constant poverty and chaos of her dysfunctional parents. This memoir teaches you to be thankful for what you have and to never give up no matter how hard things get.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a perfect example of selfishness and neglect brought upon by the parents and how influences their children through life. The Glass Castle isn’t just a story, but it is someone’s actual life and how it was affected by selfish/neglectful her parents. This is a memoir of her life and all that she went through as a child with troubled parents and how it affected her life and the life of her siblings. Jeannette is the middle child out of four children. There is Lori who is the oldest sister, Brian who is Jeannette’s younger brother, a their

The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls and it tells a story the life of Jeannette Walls and her family. Towards the beginning of the novel, the family made a pitstop at a casino in Las Vegas where the parents decided to gamble hoping they will earn extra cash. On their way home, the doors flew open, and Jeannette suddenly falls out of the car and rolls down a hill after the car took a sharp turn. The accident left her with a blood nose, multiple scrapes, and pebbles stuck on her skin. After a long wait, she began to panic that her parents decided to desert her. Eventually the car returned, and Jeannette accuses her family for leaving her behind and even refuses to hug her dad. This occurrence ends with her family calling her

I maintain, however, that in some way or another the audience is bound to be exposed to the harsh reality of the outside world. Even just going to school, they would be exposed to equally, if not, more devastating topics, like sexual harassment and school shootings. The memoir, rather than glorifying these topics like they do in movies and television shows, they are portrayed straightforwardly. For example, on page 146, Walls describes the situation: “Erma kneeling on the floor in front of Brian, grabbing at the crotch of his pants… and telling Brian to hold still,” while “his cheeks wet with tears, was holding his hands protectively between his legs.” Excessive and biased words were not used to portray walls’ loathing towards her grandma, which offers the audience to conclude their own opinions on the situation. Being straightforward with what happened opens the audience to sensitive topics and informs them of what to do, which helps them even more than if the topic was talked about lightly and cast

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.

There are various components of Walls’ traumatic autobiography that are significant. To begin with, throughout her narrative Walls uses the trauma she has gone through to show that she has learned to take nothing for granted and is appreciative of what she does have. This is a significant portion of Walls’ autobiography because it shows that a traumatic upbringing can either cause a person to fall into the same patterns that brought on the trauma, such as falling back into poverty, or the person can rise above the challenges in their lives and become determined to change their future. Another significant portion of her narrative includes different incidents when Walls and her siblings go to extreme measures to simply survive. A specific incident of this occurs when Walls describes how at lunch, she would hide in the bathroom stall with her feet up and girls

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.

The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls. In this book, Jeannette recounts her unconventional upbringing along with her three siblings. Yet, despite of it all, she grew up to have an ordinary life as an adult with a professional career in journalism. Throughout childhood, Jeannette’s family lived like vagabonds, having no permanent residence, sometimes even not having an actual home but sleeping in the family station wagon. One day they lived in the middle of the desert by Joshua Tree, the next week they lived in Las Vegas, then following week it was Welch, West Virginia. Because of all the moving that the family did, the children sometimes found themselves homeschooled, and other times were enrolled in school. The parents, Rose Mary and Rex, though flighty parents, were intellectual, artistic, and visionaries. They instilled these values into their children. Coincidentally, the children tapped into having their own traits and talents. Lori is the artist, Jeannette is the journalist, while Brian is the mediator. Unfortunately, Maureen, the youngest, never learned resiliency nor did she find herself or come to her own. As the children grew older, one by one, they moved to New York to live an ordinary life and pursue their own individual passion. Lori became a fantasy illustrator, Brian became a police sergeant, and Jeannette became a TV correspondent. Maureen was the last one to move to New

“After a traumatic experience, the human system of self preservation seems to go into permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment” (Judith Lewis Herman). The psychoanalyst Lewis Herman describes how encountering agonizing pain causes individuals to become more cautious as a result. The psychoanalytic lens is based on Freudian theories and asserts that “ people’s behavior is affected by their unconscious:...the notion that human beings are motivated, even driven, by desire, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware…” (Tyson 14-15) High schools a place where tragedy are brought upon people, but their voices aren’t heard. Melinda, a high school freshman, is the protagonist in Laurie Halse Anderson’s book, Speak.