The Glass Castle Analysis

Just by examining the more well-known passages from the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution, a person will be able to decipher what the spirit of America stands for, which is being able to mobilize all the values and ideas that were depicted in even our nation’s oldest documents. The ideas in question are that of the American Dream; a number of promises which every American can rely upon to aid them in pursuing prosperity and success, as long as that person makes the promise to work hard and never falter in the face of obstacles between them and their dream. The American Dream promises that anyone is able to trade hard work and gamble for change and freedom. It becomes clear how this, the idea of embodying everything America

In The Glass Castle, observed is the childhood of Jeannette Walls, which is permeated by the sense of no change being made due to her parents lack of will to work hard and provide a future for themselves. As a result, they attempt in instill in their daughter that there is no need to have a will to work hard or provide a future for yourself. Jeannette, however, serves as a living example to prove that there is opportunity to work hard in order to move up where it seems you’ll never have one, and to realize that pursuing the American Dream doesn’t concern itself with where you start, but with where you end. We see how as Jeannette grows up and matures throughout the memoir, that she realizes two things: that she enjoys hard work with a payoff, and that both her parents have no desire to work hard. Furthermore, she begins to tie the idea of making a change to create a change with her parents’ attitude towards’ work: maybe her family wouldn’t live in poverty and struggle to pay any bills at all if just that hard work was put in. This concept characterizes a point in the novel where Jeannette takes on a task she knows she can’t do alone: giving her family’s dilapidating house a new paint job. She gets a good portion of the house painted, and she knows that the paint won’t stay good if the job isn’t completed soon, so she calls on the help of her parents. When they refuse to help, Jeannette begins to contemplate what this shows about her family as a whole, writing “[...]we now had a weird-looking half-finished patch job - one that announced to the world that the people inside the house wanted to fix it up but lacked the gumption