The memoir, The Glass Castle was jam-packed with symbolism, themes, motifs, etc. and some were not explained. To begin, when the family was at the depot, her mother and father engaged in an intense argument. The agreement resulted in her mother trying to jump out of the window. As she clung onto the window sill, the author describes her in a yellow dress.
The Glass Castle is an eye opening experience about the bonds between family and how much one can take from their family. The Glass Castle tells the story of Jeannette Walls, the second oldest of four children, and their struggle of growing up in a nomadic and illegal lifestyle. The patriarch of the Walls family is Rex Walls, a drunken yet brilliant ex-Air Force pilot who loves his children almost as much as he loves hitting the bottle. The matriarch of the Walls family is Mary Rose, a starving artist who would rather focus on her art than her children’s dinner. Throughout the entire novel we see acts of Rose Mary’s selfishness “Mom had us climb on top of the roof of the car a pull down tufts of spanish moss” (130).
The Glass Castle is a memoir by Jeannette Walls covering her growth from childhood to adult life. Throughout her journey, Jeannette formed a close relationship with her siblings to combat the often unstable environment created by their parents. Financial instability, constant uncertainty, and persistent hunger burdened the Walls family; however, their adaptive lifestyle overshadowed these daily onuses. Jeannette and her siblings did not make the life-changing realization that they were growing up in an unhealthy setting until their teenage years. The Glass Castle depicts this tragedy, one often filled with false hope and satisfaction.
The Glass Castle is unlike any other ordinary book. This true story holds almost every detail of a poor family’s life. It holds in its pages hardships, adventures, fighting, longing, and loving. With an artistic mother named Rose Mary, a smart daughter named Lori, a beautiful daughter named Maureen, a country son named Brian, a drunk father named Rex, and herself, an adventurous hard-working daughter named Jeannette, they were those very people who made up the Walls family. They faced more challenges than the average family would.
“One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.” The Glass Castle is a spectacular forthcoming book, it is a true eye opener by showing people a look into the life of Jeannette Walls. She didn’t have it easy at all, she reveals growing up poverty-stricken living in harsh conditions, her family could barely afford food and sometimes went days without eating or drinking anything. However Jeannette Walls’s father was an alcoholic who couldn’t hold down a decent job and her mother well, she was nonchalant and free-spirited who seemed to not care of what happened to her children. The memoir allows readers to be able to step into someone else’s shoes and see what it was like to be in the same situations the author went through
The Glass Castle Symbolism Essay “She loved the dry, crackling heat, the way the sky at the sunset looked like a sheet of fire, and the overwhelming emptiness and severity of all that open land that had once been a huge ocean bed. ”(pg.21) In the Novel The Glass Castle, Jannette Walls presents fire in order to identify the theme of comfort in cruelty, ultimately illustrating that one of the most dangerous things in the world, can bring even the slightest amount of comfort to someone.
“I was certain that once everyone saw the amazing transformation of the house begin, they 'd all join in”, she thinks, but her relatives are reluctant to contribute to their dream building, and she cannot do it alone. When Jeanette admits her father will not build the house and lets her dream go, she became mature as she is no more trapped in the empty illusion and can see the life as it is. Jeanette Walls ' The Glass Castle is an outstanding example of symbolism that is used to help the reader understand the main character 's nature better. The fire, the Joshua tree, the geode and the glass castle are used to show Jeanette 's struggle through the hardships of life and her ability to take control over it
The windows are a representation of what Esperanza does not want to be. Her goal is to leave Mango Street and become something better. She does not want her life to be sitting by a window wishing for something better. She wants to be able to live her life without being tied down to something.
The Glass Castle is a personal memoir written by Jeannette Walls that clearly illustrates the struggles and the adversity she had to deal with and overcame all throughout her childhood. Jeannette and her family didn’t have what most kids had growing up, a home. They were always on the move, avoiding authorities and leaving behind no path to trace them down. They had to scrape by with what they had. With a drunken father, and a stressed out, loopy mother, there was only so much support for the kids.
Another major character in the book, Sally, marries a man. Sally may think that she has escaped from her dad’s cruel treatment but has not realized that being dependent on another person will only end her up in the cycle of abuse again. For many women on Mango Street, looking out of the window is seen as the last hope of freedom, and her husband even bans her from doing so. “ She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake. (102)”.
The title of The Glass Castle’s double meaning gives great insight to the family’s lifestyle. After always doing what Rex Walls calls, “the skedaddle,” the Glass Castle would be one of the family’s first established homes. As glass is easily broken, this is said the same as relationship between the children and their parents, “‘It’s not my fault if you’re hungry!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t blame me.
In her society, it is the woman that is left to be alone in her own thoughts, shown through her husband’s freedom to leave the house and not come back until he wants to versus her confinement to the house. This is reflected through the various “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, making her stay isolated in the house. Ultimately, the character is overtaken by the imagination and through the
Because Esperanza is capable of finding love as she says, the window acts as a device that she can direct her hope through. While fantasizing about a different life, “away from Mango Street”, Esperanza describes a house that she would find nice, a house with “flowers and big windows … [that] would swing open, all the sky [coming] in” (Cisneros 82). Esperanza isn’t content with her current life and wishes for a life with something more, a life with a house to call home. The windows that bring in the sky in Esperanza’s dream home act as a symbol for significance in life, the windows are big because they are part of Esperanza’s hopes that she has been dreaming of through windows and the sky coming in represents Esperanza being wild and free from the bounds of her current unsatisfactory environment. Windows symbolize the novel’s theme of struggling to attain a gratifying life by acting as an object for the characters to direct their hope
The Glass Castle is the life story of a girl, Jeannette Walls, and her siblings who grew up in poverty unnecessarily because of their parents’ irresponsibility. One of its themes is that strength and perseverance can significantly improve your chance at success and your future. The Walls children did not allow their childhood struggles prevent them from creating better and brighter futures for themselves. They all grew up impressively sane considering their living conditions.
Furthermore, Walls’ enthusiasm about the Glass Castle, calling it “special” and “great”, communicates to the reader that this is what she perceives to be her dream in life. She believes that the
