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The Glass Castle Jeanette Walls Personal Response

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Jeanette Walls, from what I read in the Glass Castle, is a great author. This memoir of her childhood allowed me to feel and understand her perspective and situations she had growing up. It begins with Jeanette in a taxi questioning if she had been overdressed for her party. She looks out the window and ducks down when she sees her mother digging through a trash can. This shows the distinctive class differences between the two and foreshadows the book will be about how this split became apparent. The mom and dads parenting techniques are quite unique to what I've seen or heard of. Both parents, especially Mom, are very carefree and laid back. This is first shown with with Jeanette making hotdogs for herself when she was three, which resulted in a fire and a hospital stay for Jean. This is also the first big time I questioned the fathers sanity when he ran out of the hospital …show more content…

She's then put into a mental hospital for a year. The reasoning and blame behind Maureen's actions causes arguments between the family. Tension becomes apparent as the family drifts apart. Jeanette has matured passed her teenage years of being furious with her parents choices and chooses acceptance. Her bringing vodka at her fathers request proves she realizes Dads ways can't be changed. This was also the last time Jeanette could see her father before he died of a heart attack. In the last confrontation the two set aside their differences and they spent this meeting with love and remembrance. Their last conversation about the glass castle was confrontation of its illegitimacy, but on this day, the two rejoiced in how entertaining the plan of it was. After Dads death, she reconsiders her life and choices she's made; most significantly, her marriage with Eric. The fathers death causes the family to drift even farther apart and they don't meet again until five years later on Jeanette and her new husband's

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The memoir, “The Glass Castle”, written by Jeannette Walls, is a novel filled with hardships and obstacles faced by the author and her dysfunctional family. Living with her depressed mother who weeps and sobs about her struggles in her teaching job, her alcoholic gambling father who, on a daily basis, would not arrive home, and her two sisters, Lori and Maureen and brother, Brian. Though their constant moving and chasing from the debt collectors, one person who has affected Walls life would have to be her father, Rex Walls. Although his constant gambling and consistent job loss, he has become a significant figure in Walls life. He has shown her the problems of alcoholism, the struggles, and corruptions of the world, and especially allowed

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The Glass Castle: Controversial Topics. The Glass Castle is a 2005 book by Jeannette Walls. The memoir explains the author’s life, growing up with her family most especially with her parents who could be described as nomads and deadbeats. Notwithstanding the difficult upbringing, her siblings and she had, Jeannette perseveres and becomes a successful Journalist living in New York City.

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Jeanette’s tone at the beginning of The Glass Castle is positive, even though the situations she is going through are abusive and neglectful. Her first memory is when she gets severely burned by boiling hot dogs at three years old. While at the hospital, the nurse asks if Jeannette is okay, to which she

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In the novel the Glass Castle Jeanette Walls learns from the mistakes of her parents that being successful in life depends of your characters and the choices you make in your life . Jeanette learns from her parents that if she doesn 't start thinking about her future at a young age , she’ll eventually be following the footsteps of her parents, and having an unpurposeful and an unrewarding lifestyle in her future. The Glass Castle suggests that in order to be successful in life you have to leave some things behinds and move on and that exactly what Jeannette Walls has done. Jeanette 's parents mistake was that they never thought about the future and always tried to enjoy the present. She chose to move away from her parents and live with her older sister and that decision she made was the main reason why she succeeded in life.

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She struggled with how the society and her family shaped who she was. She was exposed to her family first which made her behave the way she did under her family’s house. Jeanette struggled with her family by taking care of the house, beings told bending the rules is okay and the acceptance of her Mom’s and Dad’s homelessness. When Jeannette left her family and went to live in New York, she becomes an individual. She fends for herself and gets her life together.

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“Believe in miracles…. Hope is never lost” (Elder Jeffrey R. Holland). Believing that the worst is behind them and that they will come upon a better life is the only way that Jeanette Wall’s family is able to stay afloat. In Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle, the symbol of hope is portrayed through a Glass Castle: a real home in which everyone is important and loved.

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Then she becomes angry once she realizes she is dead. She crashes her grandma’s car trying to kill herself thinking that will make everything better. After this, she enters depression. She spends all of her time and money at the Observation Decks watching her family. Then, she begins bargaining.

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When Jeannette’s mom gives birth to her fourth child; named Maureen, Jeannette says to her, “I promised her I’d always take care of her” (46). She promises to take care of Maureen, and to take care of her Jeannette has to keep motivated and hope for the best, but also remain dedicated and try her hardest. Making that promise shows Jeannette is mature and she will accomplish whatever is possible for Maureen. As life moves on, Jeannette wants to feel like she knows what is going on in the world, “But a newspaper reporter… I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on” (204).

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While Jeannette was a junior in high school she became aware of the fact she had to get out of Welch and away from her parents. “ All through the long walk, the pain had kept me thinking, and by the time i reached the tree trunk, i had made two decisions. The first was that id had my first and last whipping. No one was ever going to do that to me again. The second was that, like Lori, I was going to get out of welch.

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So now that her husband is gone, Mrs. Mallard realizes that she doesn’t feel controlled like she used to.

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Success: An Escape from Privation Inevitably, the conflicts people face at multiple points in their life is a determining factor in shaping individuals into the person they will eventually become. Namely, these conflicts direct people 's behavior over the course of time; contributing to a person’s ability to achieve success. In particular, Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle is an honest depiction of her life and the conflicts that arise throughout her state of impoverishment, as well as the success that stems from her hardships.

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Jeannette Walls also uses the symbol of the Glass Castle, which develops throughout the memoir to show how she slowly loses trust in her father as she realises that she can not depend upon him or anyone else for happiness. The symbolism evolves throughout the memoir as Walls evolves as a person. In the beginning of the memoir, her description of the Glass Castle is naive and hopeful. Her naivety is most apparent when Walls writes, “All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert… All we had to do was find gold, Dad said, and we were on the verge of that.

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This causes Jeanette to feel proud of her father for worrying about her because she does not know what she is getting into by going to New York. Rex is trying to be protective but also helpful at the same time to keep his kids safe when he's not around. Rex is helpful when he finds out Jeannette can't pay for her college tuition and he wants Jeannette to have a good education, “Dad called a week later and told me to meet him at Lori's. When he arrived with Mom, he was carrying a large plastic garbage bag and had a small brown paper bag tucked under his arm. I assumed it was a bottle of booze, but then he opened the paper bag and turned it upside down.

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Jeanette’s childhood was shameful due to her parents careless way of living. Throughout The Glass Castle Jeannette hides her childhood just like she from her mother because she is ashamed of what people might think. Jeannette Walls lived a tough childhood because of her parents. They were always moving around trying to find a place to build a glass castle. They never gave any of their children a set home while they were growing up.

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It is evident that her childhood may have impacted her in a more severe psychological way. The book The Glass Castle is a very interesting narrative. The author Jeanette Walls is able to bring new light to circumstances that many people choose to ignore or overlook by writing about her own childhood. This gives the book a new perspective and allows the reader to gain insight.

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