The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls: Are They Helpful Or Harmful?

Paul Ryan once said, “Every successful individual knows that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together.” Individuals must strive upon excellence based on the society they are placed in. Watching how others react can help one become the best they can be. Throughout The Glass Castle, Jeannette is exposed to society by her parents. Her parents, Rex and Rose Mary, see society in different means than how others perceive it.

Jeannette Walls tells the story about her life growing up. Her family wasn 't exactly homeless, but they didn 't have a secure place to stay. They traveled all over the country looking for new adventures. She 's the age of 3 when she tells her first adventures. As the middle daughter of very strange and unique parents, she became a very mature and responsible child..

Jeannette Walls depicted an epoch of misfortune and adversity in her memoir, The Glass Castle. Jeannette and her 3 other siblings were all in a constant struggle to survive. Rex and Mary, the parents of Jeannette and her 3 siblings, were often in a constant dichotomy between submitting to self-interest and supporting the family. Having misfit parents, Jeannette and her 3 siblings were often independent and left to fend for themselves and for the family as a whole. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls evolved the theme of ideal versus reality throughout her memoir though her countless anecdotes of her father and his unattainable plans to find gold and to build a home, named The Glass Castle, for his family and her mother’s dream to become a professional and well redound artist.

Jeannette Walls gives us a better grip on the deep meaning of her text by using imagery, metaphors, symbolism, tone, and word choice. Jeannette uses these writing tools to expand our imagination. She is trying to give us an image or the true meaning of something as a tool to create that movie of the story in her reader’s heads. In these two pages from Jeannette’s story she describes the moment in her life when her family was living in a house with no insulation in the winter time. She tells us about how exactly they survived and the problems that the Walls family met.

In the beginning of the novel Jeannette Walls and her family were not doing good on cash and food and moved from place to place. Her dad and mom said they keep moving because the FBI is after them. During their moving Jeannette Walls and her other three siblings do not go to school. They are all homeschooled by their mom and learned some things from her dad. During Jeannette Walls childhood, Jeannette and her dad would talk about how they were gonna build a glass castle.

I see this quote as a way of implying to be more positive about a situation rather than be negative about it. Jeannette, in this part of the memoir, feels embarrassed due to the fact that her and her family is sleeping in a car that is falling apart. People are staring at them, and laughing which is not a great feeling at all. Her mom, on the other hand, has a totally different perspective on their situation. She would wave at these people like nothing was wrong; she was unfazed.

The permissive parenting style best exemplifies Rex and Rosemary Walls’ parenting because they rarely discipline their children, they act more like their kids friends than their parents, and they do not believe in their children’s success. Rex and Rosemary didn’t concern themselves when punishing their children for doing bad things. “It was self -defense, I piped. Dad had always said that self- defense was a justifiable reason for shooting someone” (89). Most parents would have punished their children for shooting someone, so parents who wouldn’t are considered permissive parents.

In the memoir “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls, she, and her siblings live in extreme poverty because of their unfit parents, Rose Mary and Rex, who struggle or lack interest in getting a job. Rose Mary and Rex are unfit to raise four kids because they are both immature and lazy with regard to their parenting. An act of immaturity Rose Mary and Rex shows is when they refuse to receive any forms of federal aid or grants, “Although we were the poorest family on Little Hobart Street, Mom and Dad never applied for welfare or food stamps, and they always refused charity. When teachers gave us bags of clothes from church drives, Mom made us take them back. ‘We can take care of our own,’ Mom and Dad liked to say.

1. The central moral or ethical problem explored in Farewell to Manzanar is the isolation the Watatsuki family experiences. The time period the book was written in was difficult because of racial issues and constantly moving around looking for jobs, in other words, living like a migrant worker. “The people who had it hardest during the first months were young couples like these, many of whom had married just before the evacuation.” (21) This quote shows couples were being separated unless they were legally married.

Every once in awhile a horrible situation occurs expecting the worst to happen when in reality something good comes out of it, such as the events in the Walls family in the Glass Castle by author Jeannette Walls. An event that would of turned terrible but went another direction was when Rex and Rose couldn’t buy christmas gifts for the kids (pg.39). During that period the Walls were pretty poor and couldn’t afford to get each other gifts during the holiday’s. The result of this could 've ended in sadness and disappointment, but to spare that Rose and Rex told the kids the truth where Santa wasn’t real. Telling the kids that Santa wasn’t real made them feel apart of a secret other kids didn’t know, which made them feel special.