Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” The Glass Castle written by Jeanette Walls is a memoir depicting the life of her unconventional family and her journey into adulthood. Throughout her life she has matured because of her life experiences. From surviving a fire to moving away from home and to the death of her father, these events have dramatically shaped her into who she is today. A traumatic experience that she has carried throughout her life has led her to mature and become her present self. Jeanette was very young when she encountered her first fire. It left her bedridden with burns all over her body. …show more content…
It led her to reflect on how she was living her life, and reminded her of the aspirations she had coming to New York. In the months that followed, she was uneasy, Jeanette couldn’t seem to accept the passing of her father. “ I found myself always wanting to be somewhere other than where I was. It took me a while to realize that just being on the move wasn’t enough : that I needed to reconsider everything” (280). Her father meant so much to her, now that he was gone she was loss and did not know how to move on. As a result, Jeanette realized that life on Park Avenue was not for her and decided to leave her husband, Eric. She carefully planned out her actions and reconsidered all aspects of her life. “ He was a good man, but not the right one for me. And Park Avenue was not where I belonged ” ( 281). Her relationship with Eric was good, she had a stable job and lived in a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue. However, when her Dad had passed, she became more self-aware and began making major decisions regarding her lifestyle. As time went by, Jeanette met her new husband, John. They invited the whole family for a Thanksgiving dinner at their new home. It had been five years since the death of Dad and she was now able to move on and find a closure for herself. She was strong enough to see her family which deeply reminded her of Dad. In contrast, Jeanette was now able to think of Dad in happiness. “We raised our glasses. I could almost hear Dad chuckling at Mom’s comment in the way I always did when he was truly enjoying something” (288). At dinner with all her family, she expresses her memories of her Dad in happiness, in which demonstrates her transition from grief to acceptance. Jeanette’s journey to accepting the passing of her father guided her through major changes in her life and sparked her to realise that the way she living was not right for
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Show MoreThroughout the Glass Castle there is a constant shift in Jeanettes tone through her use of diction. Her memoir is centered around her memories with her family, but mainly her father Rex Walls. Although it is obvious through the eyes of the reader that Rex is an unfit parent and takes no responsibility for his children, in her childhood years Jeanette continually portrays Rex as an intelligent and loving father, describing her younger memories with admiration in her tone. The capitalization of “Dad” reflects Jeannette’s overall admiration for her father and his exemplary valor. “Dad always fought harder, flew faster, and gambled smarter than everyone else in his stories”(Walls 24). Jeanette also uses simple diction to describe her father, by starting sentences with, “Dad said,” over and over. By choosing to use basic language instead of stronger verbs, she captures her experience in a pure and honest tone.
...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.
...astounding about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the courage and acumen to escape her lifestyle, but that she describes her parents with such affection and kindness. By having such a dysfunctional family and childhood, Jeannette was thrown into a situation where she could either sink or swim, and she chose to swim. She rose above the hand that was dealt to her, and that in itself is truly inspiring. Reading this novel instilled me with a sense of extreme gratitude for what a healthy family really is. Her story reminded me to be appreciative and thankful for my family and my upbringing. The Glass Castle is a true story of victory against all odds, and at the same time a touching, emotional novel of genuine love in a family that, despite its extensive flaws, gave her the determination and perseverance that was required to achieve a successful life on her own.
Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, encapsulates her childhood in poverty and trails her nomadic lifestyle with her irresponsible and arguably negligent parents. Although formidable and destructive when intoxicated, Walls’ father Rex was an intelligent, inventive man when sober. During the times when he was unemployed, Rex would design inventions to acquire wealth, such as “The Prospector”, a machine that would separate gold nuggets from other rocks based on weight. Moreover, he had formulated blueprints for an architecturally advanced and complex house, which had been named the Glass Castle. According to Walls’, “Once [Dad] finished the Prospector and we struck it rich, he’d start work on our Glass Castle” (Walls 25). This idea of
The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls. It not only describes the story about her strange and crazy childhood but also recounts memories of her father and mother in instances where they understood and loved each other. Throughout the novel, Jeannette Walls explains the hardships of her poverty filled childhood and the endless risk of not being able to find food. Raised by an alcoholic father and crazy mother, Walls describes her unique homeless life all through her childhood. When Jeannette's Dad wasn't drinking, he taught them many different subjects and how to live life without a fear in the world. But when he was drinking, he was untruthful and abusive. "When we tried to help him he cursed and lurched at us, swinging his fist," (Walls 289). Jeannette's Mom was a non-conformist who was against the idea of staying at home and didn't want the commitment that came with raising children. "Mom didn't like
Jeannette's mother let her children roam free and protect themselves against the dangers of the world. “fussing over children who cry only encourages them, ….. its positive reinforcement for bad behavior” pg.17. This caused Jeannette at age 3, to fall into fire and go to the hospital for months. Jeannette's mother didn’t want to have to deal with her children and told them to figure things out for themselves. This selfish act done by her mother forced her children to grow up faster. Therefore Jeannette resented her parents and wanted to make a better life for not only herself but her future children. This pushed her to succeed in life, yet without her negative relationships with her parents she might have not been able to do great things in her
The Glass Castle is a novel that follows the life of a dysfunctional family from the perspective of Jeannette Walls, the third child of the Walls family. Throughout the stories, the readers see all the hardships the children face, as their lunatic parents do what they think is right. After reading the book, it seems to agree the quote “Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands” by Anne Frank.
There are many things that someone can experience over the course of a lifetime that can determine who you do and do not want to be. Though there are many things that can stand in the way of you finding your direct path to happiness, you learn a few life lessons along the way. Jeannette Walls was a young girl whom had many of those experiences thrown her way from the age she was three, and now into her adult life. Having a father, who promised the world and really tried to catch it, was enabled by alcohol and other misfortunes that lead his life. She also had a mother, who followed the lifestyle of her father by enabling him and continuing with a life that was fickle trying to raise four children and becoming established at one place for more than a few days at a time. By taking a look at the summary of The Glass Castle, it is evident that the Walls’ conformed to an inconsistent way of living because of lack of confidence, neglect of their children, and some
The Glass Castle is a memoir written by a woman named Jeanette Walls, who describes her childhood of growing up extremely poor with an alcoholic dad, a stubborn mother, and three siblings, Lori, Brian, and Maureen. The way Jeanette’s parents, Rex and Rose Mary, raise herself and her three siblings, is much different than what I see most parents raise their children like in the society I live in. Rex and Rose Mary, in most cases, let their children do what they want, and how they want, and in some cases, sort of abandon
In the passage from the Glass Castle, Jennette’s family is trying to find and buy a house; they don’t have much money and they are looking for a marvelous home. The author of the passage conveys Jennette’s family is trying to live the American dream by moving to a low-priced home trying to build an upgraded future. The author uses indirect characterization to show how they struggle to accomplish their dreams.
The book “The Glass Castle” is written base on a true story by Jeannette Walls. The book talks about the childhood of four children Lori, Jeannette, Brain and Maureen how they grow up in a problem family. The reason for that is because of their father Rex Walls likes to drink and gets in trouble for stealing, the mother is selfish only care about herself, most of the time they don’t even a place to stay and have to be worrying about each meal. How each of the children grew up in those situation and still end up with a pretty successful life.
“Life with your father was never boring.” – Rose Mary Walls. Rose Mary Walls, Jeannette Walls’s mother and Rex Walls’s spouse, reminisces life with Rex, which included migrating very frequently, refusing to conform, and advocating self-sufficiency. In Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Walls reveals that there are turbulence and order in life, the influence of family, and how she develops as she grows up through Walls’s recollection of her life, from living in a nomadic household, where her parents neglect their children, to living in a squalid hovel with no plumbing, and finally living in New York City, where she works as a journalist.
Jeanette decided to leave for New York as a way to escape the past she came from and embrace the future she wants to have. One final event that is very important to the story is the event where Jeanette sees her mother going through a dumpster in New York while
First and foremost, I would like to say how much I enjoyed your novel, The Glass Castle. I’m not a big reader so when the book was assigned in class I sort of got bummed out; but after I started reading it, I felt like I couldn’t put it down.
In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls was no stranger to constantly moving and uprooting her entire life to move to different locations on the whim of her parents. Rex was the instigator in an all too common tactic that was a large reason for her tumultuous life. Three simple words from him forced the family to stop everything and pack up to move somewhere else. “We better skedaddle” was phrase that Jeannette knew too well in her early childhood. I was no stranger to people doing the skedaddle, but it wasn’t myself that was doing the infamous skedaddle, it was my father(s). It’s hard for me to call them all fathers, as most of them aren’t anything to me, but it’s the best description at the moment. One must understand that my mother has terrible