Themes Of The Glass Castle By Jeanette Walls

The nonfiction novel The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls portrays a powerful story of a little girl named Jean and her three other siblings who struggle growing up and the way they grow to take care of themselves and each other. Throughout the entire novel’s plotline, shown through each character and the setting, the author portrays three big themes. These three themes include; forgiveness, lost dreams, and that sometimes children can be more mature than parents. This book was overall very intriguing and a wonderful book to read. I strongly recommend reading this book to anybody who is interested in a captivating novel of a family’s hardships that captures your interest with every single chapter. The Glass Castle starts out with Jeanette

The themes are forgiveness, lost dreams, and how children can sometimes be more mature than the adults and parents. Forgiveness is a huge theme in the novel because Jeanette shows that no matter how much her parents put her through, she is able to overcome the hardships and chase her dreams without them. When she eventually accomplishes this, she’s still there to help and care for her parents. She is able to forgive them for everything in the end. The next theme is lost dreams. Jeanette and her father are very close in this novel and when dad is sober he always gave wise lessons and talked about how his plans on building a “Glass Castle”. Hence the name of the book. He was going to build the glass castle once he got enough money to do so. Jeanette loved helping him plan this and she even helped build a foundation for the house that eventually just filled up with trash. Dad’s alcoholism in this book signified lost dreams. When he was sober they could dream countless dreams. When he drank the dreams were crushed. In the end, the glass castle was never accomplished. This theme is especially showed in one of the many powerful scenes in the book. At the end of the novel, Dad says, “Never did build that glass castle.” Jeanette responds, “No. But we had fun planning it.” This scene shows two of the three themes. This shows forgiveness and lost dreams. Although that dream of building the glass castle never happened, Jean was still able to forgive. In the end they come to common grounds and are able to smile and chuckle at lost dreams and memories. The very last theme is how the children can often be more mature and responsible than the adults. This is a very significant theme because this whole novel revolves around Jeanette’s childhood and being able to overcome all the hardships to chase her dreams. Her parent’s never helped her with any of this. Her whole life she had to take