Author Jeannette Walls, in her memoir, The Glass Castle, revisits her childhood memories and relationships with her family. Walls’ purpose is to persuade people that you’re past doesn’t define who you are. To achieve her purpose, she uses a conversational tone with imagery, contrasting syntax, and anaphora in order to inspire readers to overcome their own problems. Throughout the book, Walls uses many examples of imagery to create mental pictures for the reader. This makes the writing more vivid and allows readers to feel like they're part of the action. An example is when Walls describes the houses at Little Hobart Street in Welch. She writes, “They were made of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging roofs, rusted-out gutters, and balding tar
In the Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls uses logic to get herself and her family out of situations while weighting out the pros and cons. For example the one time when Jeannette was turning ten and her dad, Rex Walls, asked her what she wanted for her birthday, she said “Do you think you could maybe stop drinking”. His first response was, “You must be awfully ashamed of your old man.”, and of course she responded back with “No… It’s just I think mom would be a lot happier. Plus we’d have the extra money.” She asked him, because she was thinking of her dads health, and the families well being. You can tell that she thought long and hard about how she was going to ask her dad, and about why she wanted him to quit.
Survival tactics have a big influence on self-sufficiency. For example in the book The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, who wrote a memoir about herself growing up. The author explains throughout her writing, all the hardships that her and her family went through, about how she and her siblings basically raised themselves. Also how they had to fend for themselves when it came to basic necessities, such as food, and clothes. This book really paints a vivid picture of how the kids use self-sufficiency in order to survive. Self-sufficiency plays the biggest role in influencing the characters in the books we have read this year, because they use it as a survival tactic.
Jeanette Walls and her out of the ordinary family live their lives surrounded in pure craziness and poverty. Jeanette has been raised to be as independent as her age allows her. At age three she could make herself a hot dog and by the age of eighteen she had started a new life in New York away from the craziness that followed her parents throughout the kids nomadic childhood. Jeanette and her siblings Lori, Brian and Maureen live their childhoods with almost nothing. They were always wondering where their next meal would come from and where there parents had mysteriously disappeared to. Rex Walls, the father and husband was a severe alcoholic who spent most of his money on gambling or a beer from a local bar. Rose Mary Walls, the mother and wife was not better, never being to hold onto a job for long enough to get paid and support her family caused many problems for Rose Mary, Rex and most importantly… the kids. The kids all had the dream of escaping the prison their parents called home and heading to New York or California where they could feel endless happiness. The kids grow up with almost no parents, which forces them to become independent from the day they were born. In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeanette's parents teach her to only rely on herself and never get attached to something you can lose, forcing Jeanette to become strong and independent throughout her childhood.
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 the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, she portrays a dysfunctional family with family members that suffer from mental illness and alcoholism. The raw story telling of Walls puts into perspective the real and shocking obstacles that she overcame. Her determined mind is opened when showing how she tries to cope with her living situation and make it bearable.
A traumatic narrative is a narrative that aims to describe an experience of extreme horror or shock that cannot be incorporated unproblematically within memory. Throughout her own traumatic narrative, Jeannette Wall’s describes different aspects of her everyday life that showcase various levels of significance. She is able to show how certain life events impact her plans for escaping her current socioeconomic status and her plans for the future. The text is also able to tell us about trauma, poverty, our selves, and our society. Furthermore, the text demonstrates the impacts of trauma and poverty and how they can have lasting impacts. These concepts help us to think about our own life experiences and situations and they also show us how to be analytical about our society. Lastly, this narrative is able to reveal to us the different aspects of a traumatic childhood and how important and impactful this type of upbringing can be. Jeannette Walls uses her own traumatic autobiography to show that despite her adverse upbringing in poverty and passive and unattached parenting she was able to become successful. The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, shows the benefits and the value that can come from having a traumatic narrative. This is significant because it shows that an experience can shape a person, but a person can also shape the experience.
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.
In the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the Walls children go on perilous adventures and are given independence from society’s rules and dicipline as a result of their parents’ beliefs. However, they are oftentimes wishing they had the security and comfort offered from a “normal” upbringing. Living a stable, sheltered life with parents that protect and disipline me and a fair chance to comfortably raise a family in the future, it is hard to even comprehend why someone would risk it at an attempt to escape the unwritten laws of civilization. In a world where freedom always comes at a heavy cost and the future of a child is never guaranteed, and in a world where children have easier access to knives and guns than to an opportunity to settle down after a safe and fruitiful life, it is difficult for me to see why a child would not be taught to follow society’s fail-proof blueprint for prosperity.
The formation of character all relies on upon the individual. Identity can be formed by the general population one surrounds his or herself with, the earth one lives in, or even past occasions of triumph and disappointment. Jeannette Walls, author of the celebrated around the world book The Glass Castle, demonstrates that the potter that formed and molded her identity was the critical occasions held in her past. Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose beliefs and difference of opinion were both their condemnation and their salvation. Rex and Rose Walls had four kids.
The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls, is an autobiographical novel that shows how hard life can be when you have little to no money and highly deteriorated parents. During the whole memoir it shows how hard it is to live in poverty while at the same time trying to raise a family. The exposition of the novel is how having parents that cannot support their children because the lack of a stable income. The rising action is when Jeannette was in a taxi cab going to a party when she sees her mother digging through the trash can and feels embarrassed and tells the taxi driver to take her home. The major conflict in the novel is a man vs. man because Jeannette, her brother, and her sister are all affected by her
Every kid wants to be able to go out whenever they want to, and yet a child wants to come home to a bed to sleep on every night. The question of whether a child wants to have freedom or security is one that someone can contemplate over and over again, and the more you think about it, the more your mind could alternate between the two options. After reading the novel The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, which is a memoir that describes the life of her nomadic family of six who dealt financial, family, social, and emotional issues all the way from her father being an alcoholic or the children at her school bullying her for her dirty clothes. The children had to deal with unusual circumstances in order to survive the ordeal, and while sometimes
Every person has a past that they want to hid and keep barred forever. But for some they decide to bring into the light for everyone to see. Jeannette Walls was one of those people who went against the norm. She decided to write the book the Glass Castle which told about her tough and adventurous past and how she rose to where she was today. Although most of the Walls go on to lead successful lives, Maureen's relationship with her parents has a negative impact on the adult she becomes.
A trauma narrative is a narrative that describes an experience or experiences that cause someone to be destressed and cannot be incorporated into their memory easily. Throughout her own traumatic narrative, Jeannette Wall’s describes different aspects of her everyday life that showcase various levels of significance. She is able to show how certain life events impact her plans for escaping her current socioeconomic status and her plans for the future. The text is also able to tell us about trauma, poverty, ourselves, and our society. Furthermore, the text demonstrates the impact that trauma and poverty can have and how they can have lasting effects. These concepts help us to think about our own life experiences and situations and they also show us how to be analytical about our society. Lastly, this narrative is able to reveal to us the different aspects of a traumatic childhood and how important and impactful this type of upbringing can be. Jeannette Walls uses her own traumatic autobiography to show that despite her adverse upbringing in poverty and passive and unattached parenting she was able to become successful. The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, shows the benefits and the value that can come from having a traumatic narrative. This is significant because it shows that an experience can shape a person, but a person can also shape the experience.
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.