Childhood In The Glass Castle

It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities. This is evident in Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, which reiterates the story of Jeannette who is raised within a family that is both deeply dysfunctional and distinctively vibrant. Jeannette is faced with numerous barriers throughout her life. Despite the many obstacles set forth by her parents during her childhood, Jeannette develops into a successful adult later in life. One of these obstacles is the lack of a stable home base moulds her into the woman she grows up to be. Throughout her life, Jeannette must cope with the carelessness of her

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 story of Jeannette Walls begins one cold March evening when she comes across a homeless woman, which is then revealed to be her mother. It is there that her troubled past comes into light in, “The Glass Castle”. But through her disastrous childhood and dysfunctional family, she manages to turn it around and and by education, expectation, and most of all environment, Jeannette grew from her experiences and came out successful and stronger than ever.

When Rex was more then likely drunk, he and Rosemary got into an argument which lead to rex hanging Rosemary out the window. She finally got back in the window and said “He tried to kill me, your father wants to watch me die” (Walls 78). Although it’s not proven that he is drunk it sure does show his violent side and how he hurting his family. Or when she was little older he had gotten drunk and really angry and went after her Rosemary “He picked up a knife too, tossing it from hand to hand. There he knocked the knife out of mom’s hand, dropping his own, and wrested her to the floor” (Walls 122). It shows that when he get drunk he gets mad and does not really care what types of trouble he causes to his

Jeannette Walls never had a ideal childhood. Growing up, she was caring for herself and her siblings, they stuck together. Her parents' actions caused various burdens and embarrassment for their children. In the book The Glass Castle Walls' parents were not perfect, but she still showed compassion and love towards them. She defended her family name and cared for them.“But I could never enjoy the room without worrying about Mom and Dad huddled on a sidewalk gate somewhere”(Walls 4).

The Glass Castle begins when Jeannette Walls is sitting in a taxi in New York City and looking out the window. She then sees her homeless mom from the window fishing through the dumpster. Jeannette later invites her mom to her favorite Chinese restaurant for lunch. While they are talking Jeannette thinks about all the things that mom and dad did to her and how it brought her here.

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.

Rex had big dreams in providing whatever his family desired. “ All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert ”(Walls 25). Rex wanted to build a great castle with solar cells, and its own water-purification system, to meet all of his family’s needs. He would pull out the Glass Castle’s blueprints and work on them at times when the family was on the move, but never actually got around to building it. He would spend most his days, away from home, drinking away at some Pub. If Rex had spent everyday building the Glass Castle, “ gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do,” then perhaps he might have been considered

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.

When William Faulkner accepted his Nobel Prize in Literature on December 10, 1950 in Stockholm, Sweden, he mentioned an idea -the writer’s duty- which he describes as writing about “the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice” mankind has been through. Authors write to remind man of the troubles, the sorrows, and the accomplishments and so he can live on. Are The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and An American Childhood by Annie Dillard examples of the writer’s duty?

A. Jeannette Walls, in her memoir The Glass Castle, demonstrates Erikson’s eight stages of development. Through the carefully recounted stories of her childhood and adolescence, we are able to trace her development from one stage to the next. While Walls struggles through some of the early developmental stages, she inevitably succeeds and has positive outcomes through adulthood. The memoir itself is not only the proof that she is successful and productive in middle adulthood, but the memoir may also have been part of her healing process. Writing is often a release and in writing her memoir and remembering her history, she may have been able to come to terms with her sad past. The memoir embodies both the proof

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.

“Dad's hands trembled slightly as he unrolled different blueprints. He had drawn frontal views, side views, and aerial views of the Glass Castle. He had diagrammed the wiring and the plumbing. He had drawn the interiors of rooms and labeled them and specified their dimensions, down to the inches, in his precise, blocky handwriting. I stared at the plans. "Dad," I said. "you'll never build the Glass Castle." "Are you saying you don't have faith in your old man?" "Even if you do, I'll be gone. In less than three months, I'm leaving for New York City." "What I was thinking was you don't have to go right away," Dad said. I could stay and graduate from Welch High and go to Bluefield State, as Miss Katona had suggested, then get a job at The Welch Daily News.

Mary Walls has proven herself to be completely irresponsible when it comes to parenting. While her parenting style and morals are only slightly different from Rex’s, the way he behaves with them pales in comparison to Mary. As Mary was telling the story of how Brian had managed to beat his childhood seizures and survive, despite the initial thought of him being another soon to be dead child, she explained a philosophy that Walls describes as, “Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them… That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior” (28). Not only does this show us that when the Walls children were babies they were ignored whenever they cried, it also proves that Mary was definitely not an attentive mother when it came to simplistic

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.