The Theme Of Escape In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

The two respective lives in which Jeannette Walls and the boy live could not be anymore distinctive, but each has to overcome insurmountable odds and find the humanity within themselves to gain the courage to help out others at the same time. Jeannette and her siblings attempt to move out of their house in Welch, by raising money to move to New York. Jeannette is given a chance to help herself get to New York by a neighbor, who asks if she would travel with them for the summer and they will buy her a ticket back, but Jeannette refuses and instead insists they take her sister: ‘Take Lori instead of me, I said. And at the end of the summer, buy her a bus ticket to New York”’(Walls 230). Jeannette and her sister have been raising up money for

The first time that Jeannette ever experiences a true violation from someone is when Billy Deel rapes her: ‘Guess what? Billy shouted. I raped you’”(Walls 87). Jeannette is too young at this time to understand what it means to be raped, but what she does understand is how horrific people can be. Jeannette is sexually assaulted several other time through the book, but she never lets these moments take ahold of her. These are traumatizing events that some people can never recover from, but Jeannette turns these shocking events into a reason to get out of her situation. Throughout the novel, when Jeannette writes about the assaults she never talks about whether or not they were traumatizing for her after, because she is able to take all the pain and turn it into opportunity. By making herself believe that once she is out of her impoverished lifestyle that she will be free from all the pain she has experienced, Jeannette becomes a more capable woman. Just like Jeannette trauma, the boy’s trauma stems from human nature and all its faults. The boy and the man are exploring the house, when they come across the worse that mankind has to offer: “On the mattress lay a man with legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt”( McCarthy). The boy has already been faced with deadly situations, but this encounter with burned people in the basement of the house influences the boy's thoughts and experiences. They boy knows that the world is unforgiving, but it is here that he truly sees the desperation of the human race. The boy, like Jeannette, is able to keep the horror of what he just saw inside him. If the boy let the trauma of what he just witnessed scare him into a state of dormancy, he would not be able to continue on his journey. Jeannette and the boy both after experiencing life changing traumas, they start to better realize the