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The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
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In Jeannette Walls memoir The Glass Castle, the Walls show characteristics of good parents. They are imaginative, very smart, and caring. Rex Walls has a big imagination throughout the memoir. He has a plan to “find gold” and build their dream house, “ the Glass Castle,” (Walls 25). Rex Walls made that plan because “people were after” him and he needed a cover up. He used the Glass Castle as a disguise to keep the children fro worrying about why the traveled so much. Jeannette Walls believed there was a demon underneath her bed. Rex Walls expressed how the demon had “evil eyes with fire in ‘em,” to go along with Jeannette’s imagination (Walls 36). When dealing with kids, imagination plays an important role. The Walls are very smart parents.
Being more engaged in his drinking, and less engaged in his word was one thing Rex Walls was good at. After neglecting this promise Jeannette, his favorite daughter, who always believed in him, eventually sees how awful alcohol makes him. Leading her to draw a end with believing in her father's word saying, “you will never build the glass castle” (238). Which then causes Rex to go into an even bigger depression.
Jeanette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle and Marshall Bruce Mathers’ “Mockingbird” both contextually illustrate the undying love and compassion between a father figure and his offspring. In the memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette anxiously believes that there is a monster under her bed. This results in her father, Rex Walls, taking her with him to try and find the monster under her bed so that they could face such a frightening beast together. They then check all over the house and end up going outside and Rex is bravely yelling and calling out this monster and Jeannette ends up joining him too. Eventually, after a lengthy period of time yelling at the monster, they ultimately decide that the monster is just a figment of Jeanette’s imagination. By calling out the monsters name, it is blandly obvious that Rex wanted to show Jeannette how to face her fears and confront them. Rex and Jeanette sit down and Rex explains to her “That [is] the thing to remember about all the monsters, Dad said: They love to frighten people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run. All you have to do, Mountain Goat, is show old Demon that you’re not afraid” (Walls 36). This quotation emphasizes the fact that the monsters that Jeanette perceives and the fear that she experiences, while lying in bed, is only a delusion created in the confines of her mind. In doing this, Rex Walls demonstrates the characteristics of an excellent father by demonstrating the compassion and love that he has for his child. Rex establishes this notion by teaching her life lessons, such as facing her fears, which prove to be helpful later on in the novel, as they assist Jeanette when she is in an anxiety provoking situations. The persona of a great father figure ...
The Glass Castle is a memoir of the writer Jeannette Walls life. Her family consists of her father Rex Walls, her mother Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori Walls, her younger brother Brian Walls and her younger sister Maureen Walls. Jeannette Walls grew up with a lot of hardships with her dad being an alcoholic and they never seemed to have any money. Throughout Jeanette’s childhood, there are three things that symbolize something to Jeannette, they are fire, New York City and the Glass Castle, which shows that symbolism gives meanings to writing.
She went off to seek the person she was meant to be. She had a purpose now, and this gave her a quest. She never gave up because she wrote the memoir from New York City and even saw her homeless mother as she passed by in a taxi on her way to her city apartment (Walls 9). Jeannette was determined on her quest and persevered through it all to become the person she is today. By utilizing symbolic, character, and situational archetypes such as fire, a hero, and a quest, Walls effectively conveys her theme of perseverance in her memoir, The Glass Castle.
The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls about her family. In this story she tells about her adventurous and dangerous childhood that shaped her to be the person she is today. Which is a strong, optimistic, responsible woman who knows how to roll with the burns and the punches literally. Brian, who is younger than Jeannette was her partner in crime in all her childhood memories. Maureen was the youngest she was not too close with the family and if I had one way to describe her it would be lost. Lori was oldest sibling and the total opposite. She was more reserved and very into her art. Which she took after their mother, RoseMary. RoseMary was a selfish woman, she would constantly put herself first. She was also, very weak and
In the book The Glass Castle the parents take a very laissez faire approach to parenting. Some people say that this is a good parenting style because it allows the children to find themselves and so they are not guided by their parents. This may work in some cases. But, in Jeannette Walls case she does not have resources to become what she wants to become. Her dad can not hold a job so they're constantly moving moving around. Also, this parenting style can be very dangerous Within the first page of of Jeannette talk about her childhood it already is a consequence of this Laissez Faire Parenting style “[Jeannette] was three years old… [She] was standing on a chair in front of the stove, wearing a pink dress…[she] was wearing the dress to cook hot dogs”(Walls 9). Already this shows a very Laissez Faire style she is cooking hot dogs in a dress. A few sentences later it talks about how her mom is in the other room singing not
Throughout the book The Glass Castle, Jeannette and her family are essentially homeless, which leaves them with dealing with the daily struggles that come along with it. Although there are only a few instances where the Walls did not have a home, the conditions they lived through were horrendous. Jeannette and her siblings cope with their situations in many ways. At the beginning, the children never complained. Their parents Rex and Rose Mary had significantly different coping mechanisms. While Rose Mary was painting or sleeping, Rex was heading to the local bars. Their ways of dealing with their living situations and overall economic and political status did not help the siblings lead a fulfilling childhood. Coping mechanisms
...d to share their deepest and most private moments with their audience members, and this in turn will create a genuine, quality story. When asked if Jeannette Walls has fulfilled the duty given to her by William Faulkner, one should not even come close to hesitating with their response. In The Glass Castle, Walls shares some of the most personal and emotion-evoking moments of her life, and they clearly include the essential characteristics of writing as defined by Faulkner. With the expert use of Walls rhetorical strategy, she makes the reader see, hear, feel, and sense the emotion as if it is occurring firsthand. So, to conclude, Jeannette Walls has most definitely fulfilled Faulkner’s expectations of a writer by crafting a memoir stuffed with superb rhetorical strategies that thoroughly translates the events in Walls’ life to the readers in a very detailed manner.
Rex Walls, a dynamic character, in the Memoir The Glass Castle written by Jeannette Walls was portrayed as drunk, lazy, pride stricken man. At first Rex started of as a hard working man but later as reality kicked in he realized the glass castle was only a figment of his imagination and he started to go down the hill and became and alcoholic. The Glass Castle was used as a symbol which represented prosperity and a safe haven. Rex used this glass castle as a means of hope for a better life but as, “The hole for the Glass Castle’s foundation slowly filled with garbage,” all hope was lost for both Rex and his family (Walls 155). Due to this incident Rex started to drink more and more which later broke his family apart. Personally I think that Rex Walls was irresponsible
Jeanette Walls is the picture-perfect illustration of an individual who finds righteousness for herself. She is the protagonist in the book “The Glass Castle”, who has an unfair miserable childhood due to how her parents were. Walls stands out for her determination as she goes out to the real world to seek her own justice, with the ultimate goal of being stable for once, and take responsibility for herself, not for the whole family.
As much as Walls loved her father, she realized he would “never build that Glass Castle. But we had fun planning it.” (279) Rex told them that special kids could have “those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness.” (39) Walls really felt special when her mother said, “life’s too short to worry about what other people think. Anyway, they should accept us for who we are.” (157) This vicious cycle proves to the reader that Walls never had a way to escape from her parent’s cruel ways; she grew up thinking like her parents did. This cruel way of thinking made Rex feel good about himself while making Walls’ feel special. The idea of the Glass Castle gave Walls a sense of hope that her dad would stay true to his word, but the impracticable idea of a house of glass symbolizes just how unstable the Walls’ foundation was. Walls said, “As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had.” (279) Rex never had the stability to protect her and she knew he would endanger her. Walls’ father Rex had extraordinary power in convincing Walls that he only wanted the best for her, even while causing her to
Every day the safety and well-being of many children are threatened by neglect. Each child deserves the comfort of having parents whom provide for their children. Throughout the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls explains the childhood from being born into the hands of parent who neglect their children. Many may argue that children need to grow with their parents; however, the removal of children is necessary if the parents disregard the kid’s needs and cannot provide a stable life for their children.
Fire. Neglect. Sexual Molestation. No one child should have to face what Jeannette Walls had to endure as a young child. However, Walls clearly shows this chaos and the dysfunctional issues that she had to overcome while she was growing up. Within her memoir, The Glass Castle, Walls incorporates little things that were important in her life in order to help the reader understand her story even more. These little things amount to important symbolisms and metaphors that help to give the story a deeper meaning and to truly understand Jeannette and her family’s life.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a harrowing and heartbreaking yet an inspiring memoir of a young girl named Jeannette who was deprived of her childhood by her dysfunctional and unorthodox parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Forced to grow up, Walls stumbled upon coping with of her impractical “free-spirited” mother and her intellectual but alcoholic father, which became her asylum from the real world, spinning her uncontrollably. Walls uses pathos, imagery, and narrative coherence to illustrate that sometimes one needs to go through the hardships of life in order to find the determination to become a better individual.
Families are different everywhere you go, but is it possible that in a community all the families could be the same? Is there really such a thing as a perfect family? These people are trying to make a family perfect so that they will meet needs of the law. In Lois Lowry’s book, The Giver, she describes how families are formed and how they interact in a perfect society, how our different family style are different, and lastly she tries to show us that our imperfect families are better.