Book Analysis Essay on The Glass Castle

Paper Type:  Book review
Pages:  4
Wordcount:  856 Words
Date:  2022-11-30
Categories: 

Introduction

The Glass Castle is a tender moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws, gave the author a burning determination to design a successful life on her terms. The memoir is about the life of Jeannette Walls and her dysfunctional family. Every childhood battles the characters faced while living in desolation in the cold dusted town of Welch, West Virginia, within an empty house with slanted porch symbolises more than a time of financial misfortune. The battles in the narrative symbolise the relationship between Rose Mary, the self-centred mother and her complicated sense of parental duties. They also symbolise their father Rex's inexorable drinking habits at the expense of the family. Rex Walls is a self-taught man, a would-be inventor who can stay longer at a poker table than at most jobs and had "a little bit of a drinking situation," as her mother puts it. Finally, these battles symbolise the four children's unmatched desire and persistence to live a life of normalcy.

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As the narrative progress, the apparent dynamic to be recognised in the memoir is love that exists between Walls and the rest of her family despite its unconventional nature. Walls goes to great depths to demonstrate the permanence of family in her memory. She describes with vast details the sense of togetherness that grew as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like taking a tumble from a moving vehicle onto the sun-baked tar of an unknown highway. Beaten up, alone and always hungry, Walls spent much of her childhood and early teens experiencing the same difficulties.

Even though this memory belongs to Walls in the reflection of its singular experience, all of her siblings went through similar misfortunes as a result of their parents' incompetence. Hence, they grow stronger internally, both in their senses of self and into the arms of the one another. They became a little tribe, fighting their battle alongside each other, always careful to protect the weakest links. Even though their strong parallelism, their unique characters were never lost on the reader. Walls is the second oldest and the narrator of the story. She is intensely resilient and at no point does she lose her capability of being relatable. Lori is the big sister with a passion for puffy paints and art. She has the dream of moving to New York City, and this dream illuminates the lives of her younger siblings until the point it came to pass.

Brian is the only boy in a family of four and the second youngest. His tricks and a genuine sense of love and support for his older sister radiate throughout the culminating days before they leave for the city. He sleeps underneath an inflatable air mattress for nearly a decade to avoid rains falling through the cracks of their broken bedroom ceiling. The same love that Brian had later made him an excellent detective and a father.

Maureen is the pretty one and the youngest, she has many friends and can escape many of the family problems through the kindness of neighbours. However, this was not enough to keep her out of danger as her lack of resilience and self-awareness made ways for substance abuse later in life. In her efforts to shine a light on inadequacies of her parents as role models and productive member of the society and as loving and compassionate individuals with misguided motives, Walls wear her heart on her sleeve for the entire memoir. She acknowledges the intersectionalities of both their personas, without any sense of bitterness. Walls' love and understanding for her family are evident through these lines, "You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them. You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that."

Taking immense care in this narrative, Walls created a story that provokes the complexity of the relationship between life, parenthood, and love, things that, if not cared for properly, can exist at the expense of one another. In her effort of transforming a tragic story into something beautiful, it was impossible not to accept the reality that no one's life is perfect and some experiences are far worse yet. In personal opinion, this book is worth reading.

Walls story is not out of this world or fictitious, but it is indeed different from other books you have read. She gives us an overview of events that happened in her everyday life, and for some, this is more interesting than a book about magic. This memoir brings us into a different world, and it is peculiar to realise that this is our world. People live like how Jeannette lives; some do it because they want to and others do it because they have to. No matter how you relate this book to the real world, it might change the way you look at things. The most memorable aspect of this work is that Walls achieves all of this without inheriting any of the troubled-childhood, coming-of-age stereotypes that are often peddled in the arena of memoirs.

Work Cited

Walls, Jeannette. The glass castle: A Memoir. 2005.

Cite this page

Book Analysis Essay on The Glass Castle. (2022, Nov 30). Retrieved from https://proessays.net/essays/book-analysis-essay-on-the-glass-castle

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