Summary Of The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

Three delicious meals of food, cold air conditioning in the summer, toasty heat in the winter, a clean bathroom, and a fresh pair of underwear to wear every day are common amenities that, in today’s world, almost all people take for granted. Think of a life without any of those wonderful things! Imagine a dinner of three-week old beans and moldy bread; all while only having a hard, cold, cardboard box for a bed, and the same dirty, stinky shirt to wear every day. That is what life was like growing up for Jeannette Walls, the author of The Glass Castle. Walls has written a timeless story that can change a reader’s entire outlook on their perfect life, and convince them to look at their everyday things through new eyes. The author used an appeal

Jeannette’s family never had enough money to buy themselves a decent house, so they lived out of rugged shacks, old abandoned buildings, and even out in the desert without any form of shelter. The author would describe each new house that her family moved into in such a way that it would persuade the reader to have such strong feelings of hatred towards Jeannette’s mother and father. Neither Mr. Walls, nor Mrs. Walls could keep a job for any decent amount of time, so after living in a house for a little, the family would get behind on the payments and have to pack their things and move on to a new place. The most memorable example of these terrible houses is the house that the family bought in Welch West Virginia. On page 153, “We called the kitchen the loose-juice room, because on the rare occasion that we had paid the electricity bill and had power, we’d get a wicked electric shock if we touched any damp or metallic surface in the room.” This house had a precarious foundation, a leaking ceiling that turned into a deluge of water during even the lightest rains, no source of heat or air conditioning, thousands of bugs, and even filthy rodents. It was a house that would definitely not be suitable for raising four kids if the child protective service had made a visit. The author effortlessly made the reader feel how awful it was to live in Welch by describing her own hatred for

However, as Jeannette grew older, her opinion of her father changed dramatically. Jeannette became aware of the horrid, alcoholic monster that was her father’s true identity. It was the way the author wrote about this topic that persuades the reader to blame all of the Walls’ problems on the father, Rex Walls. Jeannette listened and believed every word her father said to her. For example, on page 17, “Don’t you worry,’ dad said. ‘You leave that to me. Don’t I always take care of you?’ ‘’Course you do,’ I said. ‘That’s my girl!’ Dad said with a hug, then barked orders at us all to speed things up.” At this point in the story, the author’s father had just come home and told the whole family that they needed to pack their things up so that they could all move out of the house and on to a different, but equally, run-down place. Jeannette was only an innocent young girl at this point and believed that her father could never do anything wrong. The author uses the appeal to pathos to persuade the reader to feel the same way about her father, while at the same time, letting the reader begin to see that something is off with Rex Walls. Later in the story, the reader, through the eyes of the maturing Jeannette, learns that Rex Walls is a drunk, a thief, and overall a