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The Responsibility Of Jeanette Walls In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

1291 Words6 Pages

The ideas developed throughout The Glass Castle showcased many ways Jeanette Walls was able to take responsibility for mainly herself and also others in her family. In The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls is tasked with taking care of herself a lot of the time due to the lack of responsibility in the parents' parenting routines. Rose Mary and Rex Walls had been very adventurous people when they were younger, thus resulting in them having a mindset of “live like we are always on an adventure” was their type of mindset. The children often had to raise themselves for instance they would cook their food and find ways to entertain themselves and this didn't always end in the best way. When Jeanette was three she had to cook her hot dogs on the stove …show more content…

That plan unfortunately did not work and he came up with the plan for The Glass Castle, that plan also ended up being a failure by the end of the memoir. Despite those ideas that Rex had he still was unable to be a great father and provide for his family, his alcoholism caused many problems in their family where he was making threats and would even hurt the kids at times. This is when Jeanette would learn to stand up to her father and protect her siblings. Even though Lori was the oldest of the siblings she was not always able to take care of her siblings because of personal and mental struggles. So in that case Jeanette is tasked with the job of taking care of her …show more content…

When she was moving from house to house she always had to be the bigger person to help her family and her siblings, nothing was easy for her but she learned how to manage finances and how to keep her family afloat. For most of her young years, she had to mentor her siblings and be that strong role model that shaped her siblings into the adults they turned out to be. Jeanette also had to face her past in many ways throughout her life and find ways to move past the painful memories and difficult traumas. She also realized as she got older that her parents were not even close to other children's parents and that with each day that went by her parents were failing her. She also had to deal with finding exciting things that were only to be taken from her, like when her mother inherited all the money and told Jeanette she had a huge home in Texas. Her mother told Jeanette and the family that she had inherited all this money just for her and Rex to use it all and send them back to having no money and barely a place to

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288 Words | 2 Pages

The memoir, The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls, has many conflicts between parents and children. Rex and Rose Mary Walls both have their good but also have a lot of bad and are incredibly irresponsible sometimes. They also neglect their children throughout the story, make poor decisions, and believe a lot in self-sufficiency. At the beginning of the book, Jeannette Walls is three years old cooking hot dogs all by herself. She is using the stove unsupervised at an extremely young age, with her mother in the other room focusing on her painting.

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251 Words | 2 Pages

Rex believes that Jeanette was able to handle herself and

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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.

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937 Words | 4 Pages

While some of these skills may have been a little too out of control and could have been harmful for their children at times, some of these skills helped them become more independent and self reliant people. Without the rough childhood that Jeannette went through, who knows if she would have been able to become the successful person that she is

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758 Words | 4 Pages

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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811 Words | 4 Pages

Such as when she was cooking hotdogs for herself at the age of 4 because her mother wouldn't do it. And ended up burning herself, being rushed to the hospital. She loved being in the hospital because she felt she was cared for and the doctors asking her why she had so many other cuts and bruises. Jeanette explained “I got the cuts and bruises playing outside”(10). Very early in the book I recognized this was an example of the American dream.

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746 Words | 3 Pages

The Glass Castle is the one idea that helps the family continue to grow and move forward even though the Castle has different meaning to each of the members of the family. To Jeanette and her siblings the Glass Castle is a symbol of hope, to the mother, it is a symbol of relaxation and what life would be like without responsibilities, and to dad, it symbolizes every broken promise he has made to his children, but in the Glass Castle, he has not broken a single one.

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723 Words | 3 Pages

At the start of the book, Jeanette was living in New York and she was always ashamed of her mother. Weather it be the tattered clothes she wore of when she rooted through dumpsters. At the time this seemed very odd. As the book goes on you realize that they had difficult childhood. Although they had a tough childhood their mother was always there for them.

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1124 Words | 5 Pages

Rex tends to show highly abusive traits while influenced by alcohol, which is noticed by the family on several occasions. “When dad went crazy, we all had our own ways of shutting down and closing off, and that was what we did that night.” (Walls 115) Having known that Rex has been parentally absent for most of their lives while he claims he is busy trying to build them the Glass Castle, Jeannette and her siblings grow up more mature and with a greater understanding of the world and how to manage in such conditions without relying on their parental figure to guide them. Being more mature also means feeling prepared to escape being limited by their parent’s control.

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1956 Words | 8 Pages

It is crucial to Jeanette’s development that she recognizes the need to be independent and to acknowledge the drive and determination required to succeed in life. Without the ability to persevere and push oneself past their fears, a person will inevitably fail, something Jeanette will not tolerate. In another example, while

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659 Words | 3 Pages

The Glass Castle is a perfect and stable home, a better future for the family to live in. It is a recurring dream and goal for Jeannette's father, Rex, who wants to build a grand and beautiful home for his family. However, In Jeannette Walls' memoir "The Glass Castle," the Glass Castle changes from a symbol of hope for the family and turns into a reminder of the gap between dreams and reality, eventually becoming nothing more than a faint memory, a reminder from the past of what it took to survive the hardships and dysfunction of the Walls family. In the beginning of the book, Jeanette describes her life as a never ending adventure “with nothing but the best outlooks for her life.

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701 Words | 3 Pages

Jeanette wanted to escape Welch because of her unstable lifestyle, but she had fully given up on her parents. As she created her plan to escape, she said: “I had been counting on Mom and Dad to get us out, but I now knew I had to do it on my own” (Walls 221). She had finally realized that she could not rely on

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1118 Words | 5 Pages

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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1173 Words | 5 Pages

As Rex’s children get older rex get more and more worried about the kids. In the end of Rex’s parental run Rex becomes more productive with the way the kids run their own lives. Throughout The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, rex changes from an intelligent drunk to a paranoid person to a helpful father. In The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, Rex Jeannette’s father shows that he is very smart.

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611 Words | 3 Pages

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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