Character Analysis Of Rex In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

Imagine a close friend who is very intelligent, very good at his job and has hopes for his family to become rich and achieve all of their dreams. Seems like a great person right? Now imagine, this same person is an alcoholic who is addicted to gambling and loses most of the families money doing so. Is he still a great person even with his flaws? Although well intentioned, Rex, from The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, is self- absorbed, and thus impacts his children in a negative way.

I honestly believe that Rex tried to do nothing but good for his family but did not realize that it may have only been his doing why this family did not get to those dreams that he himself had once established for them to reach. Rex consistently went out and blew all of the money that Rosemary and himself would bring in that they could have been using for the essentials or even for saving some money for the future but instead he went and gambled it at casinos. A quote from the book that perfectly fits this was, "He simply waited

He is the perfect definition of a shapeshifter in literary terms. Rex is never a solid character. he is always fluctuating between inspiring his family which is evident at the beginning of the book when Jeannette said, “When dad wasn’t telling us about the amazing things he had done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do,”(Walls 25). But then he would switch to someone who like i mentioned before would blow away the family money, leave the family for days, and even threw a cat out the window. It had to be hard for the family to deal with this inconsistency on almost a daily basis. Once Rex realizes the unlikeliness of his dreams, he gives up and falls into a deeper dependence on his children and alcohol. Rex changes from a loving, idealist to an alcoholic. Which leads me to my last point regarding to his alcohol