Motifs In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

In the novel The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the author uses the glass castle motif to convey that empty promises lead to a loss of trust. Rex promised to build a glass castle for the Walls family, but after he found “gold, Dad said, and we were on the verge of that. Once he finished the Prospector and we struck it rich, he’d start work on our Glass Castle” (25). Rex manipulated the Walls family into trusting that he will be the one to dig them out of the situation they are currently in by finding gold and building a glass castle. He uses the excuse of needing to find gold first so he can put off building the glass castle and is doing all of this so he can receive constant praise from the children while not having to do any work to improve

One day Dad told us to dump it in the hole. ‘But that’s for the Glass Castle,’ I said. ‘It’s a temporary measure,’ Dad told me” (155). After Rex fills the glass castle’s foundation that the Walls children worked so hard to dig, the chances of the Glass Castle being built became clearer to them. Rex tells the kids that creating a landfill in their own front yard is a “temporary measure” in a desperate attempt to reassure the children that he is still on track to building the glass castle. A few years later Jeanette was planning to move to New York for greater opportunities. One night Rex came in with some papers and asked her if she had a minute. He proceeded to “spread the papers on the drafting table. They were his old blueprints for the Glass Castle, all stained and dog-eared. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them… He had drawn the interiors of rooms and labeled them and specified their dimensions, down to inches, in his precise, blocky

When Jeannette was visiting her friend’s home in Battle Mountain, her friend “pointed toward a shiny gold contraption dangling from the ceiling, which she proudly identified as a Shell No-Pest Strip… I went home and told Mom we needed to get a No-Pest Strip like Carla’s family, but she refused. ‘If it kills the flies,’ she said ‘it can’t be very good for us”’ (64-65). Jeanette’s mother doesn’t want to buy the no pest strip because she wants to preserve nature which seems fine because the lizards will eat the flies, but by doing this she has caused her home to be infested with flies and lizards and decline the family’s living conditions severely. While the Walls home in Phoenix was infested with cockroaches and termites, Jeanette “suggested we buy roach spray, like all our neighbors did, but Mom was opposed to chemical warfare… Lori’s foot crashed through the spongy wood floor in the living room. After inspecting the house, Dad decided that the termite infestation was so severe that nothing could be done about it. We’d have to coexist with the critters” (100-101). This case is similar to the last, but even worse. There was nothing to kill the cockroaches or the termites besides the pesticides Rose Mary refused to buy, so the Walls family decided to live with the bugs, declining their living conditions even more. Their house in Phoenix became uninhabitable because of the infestation