The Theme Of Escape In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

In Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle, fire symbolizes the instability that the Walls family constantly deals with. Jeannette questions if fire is out to get her and how she “lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire”. Jeannette has this viewpoint due to Rex’s own contribution of unreliability in the household. The fire in this instance also represents the chaos of Rex’s abhorrent alcohol abuse.

In many of the cities the Walls resided in, Jeanette became a target for numerous physical altercations. In Battle Mountain a boy named Billy became so enraged at her rejection, that he attempted to rape and shoot Jeannette. In Welch, her classmates would often jump her, in need to prey on someone more underprivileged than them. During each

Often in literary works the minor characters’ characteristics or traits highlight the major character’s traits to emphasize and illuminate the meaning of the work. In Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle loyalty in family is strongly emphasized. The parents’, Rex and Rose, selfishness highlights Jeannette’s loyalty to them even when they are not being great parents. Throughout the book, Jeannette is her parents’ backbone and ride or die; she displays unconditional love to them.

Jeannette, while working at her high-school newspaper, also gets a job to save up some cash to move her sister to the Big Apple. Rex steals the money, wanting to keep his kids at home, but Jeannette and Lori succeed in scrounging up bus fare, and Lori ships herself off to the West Village. Jeannette soon joins Lori, they save up enough to bring over Brian and Maureen. They're enjoying a very happy big city lifestyle, but it doesn't last long.

Everyone can dream big in life. Whether it’s to become an astronaut or the next president ,but life isn’t a dream we live in . Being realistic is more valuable than dreaming big. First of all , being real is the safest way to achieve success.

This also set a tone to Erikson stage trust vs. mistrust and intimacy versus isolation. Tom has basically learn who he must trust and not to trust. Tom easily understood why he should distrust; even hate the perpetrators of this crime, they broke in and rape them that is an understandable reason why to not to trust them. Tom didn’t get why his mother would denial it in trying to cope it with her own anguish. Denialing it seem to make tom to consider her self-center.

Jeannette narrowly escapes rape, but because her father exploits her in a way that makes it seem like she would consent to underage sex, she is abused. The sexual abuse Jeannette suffers results in her having more trust in her own intuition as she

Nicholas Sparks once said, “I don’t know that love changes. People change. Circumstances change.” In the memoir, The Glass Castle author Jeannette Walls shows how her father Rex Walls changes with everything thrown at him as a father or four. In the beginning of being a parent Rex shares his intelligence with his children.

“Believe in miracles…. Hope is never lost” (Elder Jeffrey R. Holland). Believing that the worst is behind them and that they will come upon a better life is the only way that Jeanette Wall’s family is able to stay afloat. In Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle, the symbol of hope is portrayed through a Glass Castle: a real home in which everyone is important and loved.

When Jeannette tells her mother: “I was too ashamed, Mom. I hid.” (page 5) she means this in two different ways. One being because she is ashamed to say her parents are homeless while she is not. Another is because she realizes that she felt this way during her childhood because there was a way they could have prevented it, but they chose not to.

Jeannette described that this experience made her feel used by her father and gave her a sense of self-worthlessness. Rex knew that Jeannette had a soft spot for him and he took advantage of this. Jeannette has a psychological scar from this for the rest of her life, and it produced long-term effects of distrust and diminished self-worth. As a child she had been through more than most adults, and in one case she even wakes up in the middle of the night with a child molester in her bed. “One night when I was almost ten, I was awakened by someone running his hands over my private parts” (Walls 103).

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.

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.

After graduating middle school her friend lost touch with her and eventually left her life for good: “By the time she got to Welch High Dinitia changed.” Jeannette was also sexually harassed by one of her friends in Phoenix while playing hide-and-seek: “Billy smushed his face against mine… ‘Guess what?’Billy shouted. ‘I raped you’” Lastly, while going to school in Phoenix Jeannette was bullied for being smart and skinny: “The other students didn’t like me much because I was so tall and pale and skinny and always raised my hand too fast… A few days after I started school, four Mexican girls followed me home and jumped me in an alleyway…”

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.