The books, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, are exemplary models of an American family in poverty, and their journey and struggle to survive. They had to live off of what they had and they thought their lifestyles were normal until realizing others have it easier. Each of these families used different strategies in order to survive their insolvent circumstances and hardships. In Salvage the Bones, Esch and her family kept moving and giving each other strength to survive, during a devastating storm in which left them homeless. In The Glass Castle, even though the Walls family was in poverty and didn’t have a permanent home and were always moving. Their father distracted them from their problems by filling their …show more content…
The novel, Salvage the Bones, was narrated by a girl named, Esch Batiste, who lived in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, in a small, fallen apart house. She spends most of her time with her three brothers; Randall, Skeetah, and Junior. Their mother had died giving birth to Junior. Due to this, their father is a drunken mess who only worries about the hurricane Katrina. Later in the story, Esch found out she was pregnant with Skeetah’s best friend's’ baby at the age of fourteen. She knew her family wouldn’t be able to financially support the baby, so she kept the secret from them. During this time, Skeetah was caring for his fighter dog, China, and her puppies. Since they were a poor family, Skeetah would often have to steal food and other materials to care for them. They often stole from a richer families’ home; they took materials for the house
Introduction: The glass castle by Jeannette Walls is the book I chose to read for our summer reading assignment. The glass castle is about 3, eventually 4 kids who have always been told to chase their dreams no matter what happens or where it takes them. The parents which consists of a selfish mom who does stuff to benefit her own needs and a dad who’s a drunk, live by this quote and unfortunately chasing their dream leads them to live their life in poverty, filled with lies, misery, and struggle but with a little hard work, and perseverance the walls children flourish. Summary: The story starts off with little Jeannette walls at the age of three making herself a hotdog.
The Glass Castle is a nonfiction book that was later turned into a movie. The book was written by Jeannette Walls, and the book is about her life. This story is about family dynamics. The Walls family moved around often and each member had their own set of difficulties. I think the book was turned into a movie for two reasons: the book is not appropriate for younger readers and not everyone wants to or has the time to read a book.
The Glass Castle Summary The Glass Castle is an autobiographical story written by Jeannette Walls about her crazy, dysfunctional family. It is 288 pages long and was published by Simon and Schuster published in March 2005. Most of the characters fall into multiple categories of character types. Rex Walls, for example, is a protagonist when he gets money for his daughter to stay in college, but is an antagonist when he steals their New York money.
The novel, The Glass Castle, shows how the Walls family lived without welfare. Both Rosemary and Rex refused to take charity or government aid despite the children and others pleading them to take it. Rosemary objected to conforming to what the society thought was best. Rex argued that his sporadic income was enough to keep the family afloat. However, the children begged their parents to accept other 's help to ease the financial burden on all of them.
No matter how messed up, annoying, or just plain out crazy your family is, at the end of the day they’re still your family and you love them. In the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, you will learn and read about a very dysfunctional family. Throughout Jeanette’s childhood she went through constant struggles. From catching on fire trying to cook herself a hog dogs when she was 3, to moving over 20 times throughout the years while her parents struggled to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Jeanette shows us that despite bad parenting, a child can still become resilient.
Moreover, there is a copious amount of stories of people struggling to survive. We experience some of those accounts in Nickel and Dimed by journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, a novel about the working class of America, and also in Living
When society thinks of the word “childhood,” they imagine it as a precious time for children to be in school and freely play, to grow and learn with the love and support from people dear to their hearts. It is also known to be a cherished period where children are to be innocent and live carefree from fear. However, in the context of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, childhood is viewed as a tough hardship that Jeannette and her siblings have overcame, and the memories they carry has greatly impacted their lives that it has molded them to who they are
The book, The Glass Castle written by Jeannette Walls, was about her younger self along with her family explaining how they struggled through hard challenges such as relationships, financially, and mainly through life. Jeannette had to learn to survive on her own by growing up fast to an adult in order to take care of her siblings, when her parents wouldn’t, and had to fit into the normal world outside of their home. It was very hard for Jeannette and her siblings to attend school because they would always move to different locations and they didn’t have the clothes that everyone else had, or didn’t have enough food to make them look healthy, and it was difficult for them to make friends with other people, when people from each town viewed
In Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Susie Solomon stands as the protagonist of the novel whose life is cut short by her foil character, Mr. Harvey. In Susie’s narration of her family’s coping with her unexpected murder, she emits pure love and tenderness in a naively large supply for everyone until, and in most cases after, her final interaction with Mr. Harvey. Even in her death and her placement in purgatory, “[Susie] worried that [her] sister, left alone, would do something rash”(29) and “[she] wanted to kiss [Franny] lightly on the cheek or have [Franny] hold [her]”(41). This natural desire to protect her sister and to give/receive comfort from her friend similarly condemned to purgatory shows how her death did not change her character,
A hardship that many people have to endure is poverty. The characters in the short stories, Angela’s Ashes, by Frank Mccourt and The Street, by Ann Petry, both experience living in impoverished conditions. In the story The Street, Petry shows the life of a single mother who lives through the struggles of being poor. In another story portraying poverty, Angela’s Ashes, the author uses kids to paint the image of indigence. These kids are burdened with the task of caring for themselves.
In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Jeannette manages to overcome her obstacles by realizing her independence. She is impacted by her parents’ incapabilities because she realizes that she has to do things differently than other children. Her father was a stubborn alcoholic who believed that: “[they] were all getting too soft, too dependent on creature comforts, and that [they] were losing touch with the natural order of the world”(Walls 106). He believes that every human should be independent and fend for themselves. By using the term “creature comforts”, her father is trying to separate himself from what he calls the civilians.
lIn the book “The Glass Castle” there are examples of many different Family Developmental periods, however I will discuss one that stuck out to me the most. Family development according to the textbook “Family Theories: Foundations and Application” by Katherine R. Allen and Angela C. Henderson is “a longitudinal process of going through a hierarchical system of age and stage related changes” (Allen & Henderson, 84). This means that as a family there are various stages at different ages that result in different changes. For example, this can be seen within the book The Glass Castle in many ways. One way that stuck out to me the most was when Lori and Jeannette are making plans to transition into adulthood.
Imagine if your parents didn’t care enough about you, well that’s how Rex and Rose Mary Walls were with their children. In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls shows how her parents, Rex and Rose Mary were not suitable parents because they didn’t put all their effort into taking care of their children. Rex Walls is a very big addict. He is very addicted to drinking and gambling. Rex used to gamble a bunch to get money instead of getting a job.
Poverty and Mental Health Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, demonstrates the struggles of mental health issues that generate from poverty through her family’s journeys, both mentally and physically. Jeannette Walls displays how poverty can affect an entire family’s life through her use of realism, in-depth descriptions, and imagery in her memoir, The Glass Castle. The Glass Castle focuses on the tie between mental health issues and poverty through the theme of the lasting effects of poverty. Poverty in Jeannette’s younger years is the cause of the majority of her anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. The Walls family’s period of time in Phoenix contributed to Jeannette’s mental health issues.
In this world, there’s learning things the hard way and the easy way; in Jeannette Wall’s world, there’s only learning things the hard way. The Glass Castle is an adventurous story that reveals the painfully miserable story of Jeannette Walls. A selfish mother, a careless father, and terrible social encounters- these are some of the elements of a harsh reality Rex and Rose Mary Walls failed to shield their children from. Growing up poor was already difficult, but growing up with a selfish parent, specifically an unfeeling mom, made life hell for the Walls children. The family barely had one source of income from Rex Walls, and instead of helping out with the family’s finance issues, Rose Mary spent her days at home painting.