Analysis Of The Glass Castle By Jennette Walls

Jennette Walls’ self-memoir, The Glass Castle, recalls her events during her childhood. Throughout her childhood, Walls had an evolving relationship with her father, Rex Walls. However, it is steadily shown that Walls begins to separate from her parents and what she believes about them.

Prior to Jeannette’s birth, Rex Walls was a fearless American that was freely able to do whatever he desired. However, Rex’s true reason for his wild behavior was the environment that he grew up in. Walls grew up in the foreign part of Welch where he was forced into a society where he felt like everyone else. He had to be educated and taught the same way as others. While he despised the society he lived in, Walls was rewarded with a higher education about many

She always trusted in him whenever he talked greatly about building a “Glass Castle”, a home where they could have infinite rules. However, as time passed and there have been no signs of process building the castle, Jennette has started to lose trust in her father. “Life got even tougher when Jeannette was 10 and the family settled in hardscrabble Welch, W.Va., Rex's hometown. Rex's drinking was out of control, the kids went hungry for days in their rat-infested shack, and as the poorest of the poor...” (Hubbard).

During her 10th birthday, Jeannette asks her father to stop drinking to make her, as well as the family, happier. This caused Walls to have a mental breakdown and ties himself to his bed preventing himself to drink alcohol. While this process did take weeks, it wasn’t long until Walls returned into his drinking habits again. This incident showed Jeannette that her father wasn’t capable of thinking for his children let alone taking care of himself. However, Jeannette’s mother wasn’t better than her

“On at least one point, though, their parents were right: The Walls kids were smart. The oldest daughter Lori escaped to New York City, where she worked as a nanny; Jeannette and her younger siblings Brian and Maureen eventually followed. For Jeannette the turning point came when her mom left for a job in a nearby town, leaving her 13-year-old daughter with just a few dollars to feed her and her siblings. Rex begged, and Jeannette gave him the cash to buy beer instead. ‘I realized that as much as I loved him, I couldn't fix him,’ she says. ‘It gave me a kick in the behind that I had to get out’" (Hubbard). While Rex did find out his children were leaving to a lifestyle better for them, he was devoted to not let Jeannette out of his grasp.

Prior to leaving Welch, Jeannette is stopped by her father trying everything he could to keep her in the house. Rex then reminds Jeannette about building the glass castle, an imagination of his mind and a promise never kept to his children. Jeannette doesn’t respond to her father pleas and leaves for New York without looking