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Argumentative Essay On The Glass Castle

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The title of the book, The Glass Castle, is repeated throughout the book as a dream that her father had. The family knew that he would never actually build the castle, but her father still talked about it like he would actually do it, and Jeanette would believe him. Jeanette's father made her many promises, but he did not follow through with the promises. Whenever she questioned him about the promises he made to her he justs says, “Have I ever let you down?” Jeanette knows that he had let her down but she does not say it, and she had “heard that question at least two hundred times” (Walls 210). For example, for her birthday Jeanette asks her father to stop drinking. He promises her that he would do anything for her “if it’s humanly …show more content…

The Glass Castle represents the hope that is lost, and how it shatters like glass, like how the Walls family finds hope, but eventually lost it and went back to their old habits of just barely scraping by. The Glass Castle gave Jeanette and her family a false hope when they believed that their father would actually build the castle. Jeanette realizes that her father will not build the Glass Castle once she reaches adulthood, as she grows up she slowly begins to believe in this dream less and less. She stops believing in this because her father makes many promises to her, but he never fulfilled those promises. When they began to build the glass castle like her father told her they would, Brian and Jeanette had dug the foundation for the Glass Castle, her father tells her them to throw the trash into the hole, this is like calling their dream garbage. Even though they took so much time to build the foundation, believing that it was actually for the castle, “the hole for the Glass Castle’s foundation slowly filled with garbage” (Walls 155). He told them many times that they would build the castle, and that they only needed money to build it, but they never do. Even when they actually have money from Jeanette’s grandma dying, he

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