The Glass Castle Jeanette Walls Character Analysis

Jeannette’s Tone Change As a result of maturing and learning new things, perspectives on people usually change. This is what happened with Jeanette Walls in her novel, The Glass Castle. Her initial attitude towards her father, Rex Walls, is loving, supportive, and faithful. However, when she is able to process how many times her father has let her down, her tone in the book changes to being very critical and clinical. 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

“I told him I that I would never lose trust in him, and I promised myself I never would”(76). At this point in the story, Jeannette is the only one who seems to still believe in her father. She looks up to him with a child’s eyes and always wants to be there for him. After failing her everyday, having faith in her father begins to be a struggle for Jeanette, and her tone changes. “If Francie saw the good in her father, maybe I was not a complete fool for believing in mine, or trying to believe in him. It was getting harder.”(169) Jeannette’s trust and love in her father is getting very small, because of the way he abuses alcohol and lets her down. When Jeanette tells us that she believes she is a fool for believing in Rex, it shows a change in her town to be unbelieving and critical. Throughout The Glass Castle, Jeanette’s tone of Rex Walls goes from very trusting to very disbelieving. When she was young, she could not process the way her father raised and treated her, so she believed everything he said. When she is able to understand, her tone changes and becomes clinical and critical remembering the way he constantly let her