The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls Character Analysis

Taylor Savage

Mrs. Ruch

Honors English 11&12

January 11th, 2016

In the first few years of a child’s life, every experience they have shapes them. Throughout the book Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, the main character Jeannette is constantly neglected. Her mother and father were not the most responsible people, and their attitudes about life help to develop Jeannette and her other siblings outlooks on life. Throughout the book, the relationship between Jeannette Walls and her father Rex Walls changes dramatically. She goes from looking up to her Father as a great role model, to looking down upon him, and feeling as though he does not do enough. As Jeannette matures, the picture that she has painted in her mind about her Father starts to

The dream of becoming rich was never accomplished due to the fact that Rex Walls was an alcoholic. In their younger years, Jeannette and her siblings were never severely affected by their Father’s alcoholism. They grew up with it, and they seemed to accept it as something that was a part of their everyday life. At the start of the book, Jeannette’s father promises her that once he finished building his machine to find gold, he would build a Glass Castle for them to live in. This promise strengthens the bond between Jeannette and her Father by allowing them to collaborate on something of major importance. Jeannette had a view of this castle in her mind that her Father was going to build. “When dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project. A big house he was going to build for us in the desert. It would have a glass ceiling and thick glass walls and even a glass staircase…He carried around the blueprints for the Glass Castle wherever he went, and sometimes he’d pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms. All we had to do was find gold, Dad said and we were on the verge of that. Once he finished the Prospector and we struck it rich,

I could stay and graduate from Welch High and go to Bluefield State, as Miss Katon had suggested, then get a job at The Welch Daily News. He’d help me with the articles, like he’d helped me with my piece on Chuck Yeager. ‘And I’ll build the Glass Castle, I swear. We’ll all live in it together’...‘Dad,’ I said, ‘as soon as I finish classes, I’m getting on the next bus out of here…Go ahead and build the Glass Castle, but don’t do it for me.’ (238) This is the final straw for their relationship. Once Jeannette finally makes her father see she is leaving for good, their relationship is never the same. The Glass castle symbolized the bond between Jeannette and her Father, and once Jeannette has broken the dream of the Glass Castle, she can finally look toward her future, and become her own person.

Throughout the memoir “The Glass Castle”, the relationship between Jeannette and her Father changes dramatically. In the beginning of the memoir, Jeannette and her Father had a good relationship. She trusts her Father with everything, and looks up to him as her role model. As the memoir goes on, their relationship starts to change. Jeannette starts to see all the bad in her Father instead of only seeing the good. At the end of the memoir, Jeannette finally tells her Father how she feels. Overall, their relationship changed entirely, and it led Jeannette to turn a new leaf, and become her own