...In “The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls, Rex and Rosemary Walls have a permissive relationship with their children, although they provide their children with the “basic needs” (Cherry, “The Four Styles of Parenting”). They are irresponsible parents and show “little communication” (Cherry) and in some cases are more supportive when they should be more cautious or stern with their children. Rosemary Walls is being an uninvolved mother by not monitoring Jeanette while she is cooking hot dogs instead she lets Jeanette make them herself and it leads to a bad conclusion. In the memoir “The Glass Castle” Jeanette says, “Then flames leaped up reaching my face” (9). If Rosemary was helping Jeanette cook the hot dogs she more than likely would have...
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...I am currently reading The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls. I believe that the author chose this title because it had some sort of significance to her. This reason could be something simple to see, or something much deeper. When the author was young, her father said that he would build the family a castle made of glass. “When dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about all wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle.” (pg.25) As a girl, she constantly looked forward to the day she would finally live in the castle. Her father had already made the blueprints and carried them on his person wherever he went. “Dad had worked out the architecture and the floor plans...
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...measurement of a person’s strength of character. In the story, My Left Foot, Christy Brown’s disability is overwhelming; however, he perseveres with his limitations until he is able to write with the one limb that he has control of – his foot. Jonathan, in the story “Civil Peace,” learns that in order to live a life of contentment after losses that occur to his family during war, he must learn to accept the fate God allows. Jeannette Walls, in The Glass Castle, also learns that her salvation in life comes from acceptance of both her parents and her past. Resilience is a quality that can be modeled, but most people gain this trait from enduring and overcoming the hardships that they face in order to survive and ultimately, thrive. (OR): Christy Brown from My Left Foot, Jonathan Iwegbu from “Civil Peace” and Jeannette Walls from The Glass Castle are resilient in their ability to overcome hardship. In the autobiography, My Left Foot Christy Brown… In the short story, “Civil Peace,” …….. In Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette depicts her journey through a chaotic childhood to adulthood; in this tale she learns to transcend poverty with forgiveness and grace. For example, when her father terrifies her by throwing her in the Hot Pot springs, he says to her, “If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim” (Walls 66). Struggling alone in the water, she learns that no one can save her but herself. Whether cooking her own hot dogs, or dealing...
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...The book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls tells the story of Jeannette and her family. Jeannette certainly did not have the easiest life growing up, but she may have had one of the most interesting. I enjoyed the book because the experiences that Jeanette and her family went through make for a very exciting read. These experiences are out of the ordinary and don't represent how a typical American family would live. Jeannette was born into a rather peculiar family. She had a mother and father, and two older siblings, but the way that the family lived made them peculiar. Her parents were not the most cautious of her well being. They believed that their kids should be able to take care of themselves, and that too much parental intervention would lead kids into becoming too dependent. This said, one can imagine how the kids lived. Jeanette and her siblings were constantly in dangerous situations since supervision was limited. Walls even writes that her first memory is being on fire (9). She was making hot dogs over a stove and caught herself on fire. Her mother thought that it was a good idea to let her three year old daughter cook hotdogs over an open fire. She was alright other than a few burns and was hospitalized. Six weeks into her hospitalization her father comes to "check out, Rex Walls-style". He picks her up out of her bed and runs out of the hospital (14). Anecdotes like these are frequent in The Glass Castle. They are not all as tragic as this, but they are all very...
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...The Glass Castle is a extremely detailed memoir of the upbringing of Jeannette Walls. Her life was an incredible journey with hardship meshed into each day she spent alive. But the hardship in Jeannette and her sibling’s lives did not discourage them, instead it drove them to become stronger people. Additionally, the events told of in The Glass Castle largely revolve on the idea of family, what it really means, and the roles of each family member. Jeanette’s family life involved harsh realities that she would understand as she matured. The life of Jeannette Walls was as adventurous and captivating as a work of realistic fiction, in the execution and the substance, but it is all true by the word of the author. The story of the Glass Castle...
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...Book Report on Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls 1 Book Report on Jeannette Wall’s Glass Castle Book Report on Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls 2 Jeannette Walls's story is one that gives the reader an idea of what it is like to grow up in a very complex and often self-destructive family system. Jeannette Walls's memoir Glass Castle begins with her riding in a taxi through contemporary New York City on her way to a party. As she looks out the taxi window, Jeannette sees her mother digging through a dumpster. Even though her mother had been homeless for years, Jeannette was all of a sudden filled with shame and gloom about her mother's life. Jeannette then begins to reflect on her childhood and how her Mom and Dad's choices affected her. The story then transitions to a three-year-old Jeannette and her story of catching her dress on fire while cooking her dinner. After a few days in the hospital, Jeannette's father shows up, lifts Jeannette out of bed, and leaves the hospital without paying the bill. The memoir continues with the family moving town to town in the American Southwest. Only staying in one place until Jeannette's father could no longer hold a job, or her mother demanding they spontaneously uproot and start again. Jeannette's father's paranoia about the state and organized society, coupled with his alcoholism, leads them to move more and more frequently. Finally, they settle down in a small mining town, Battle Mountain, Nevada, for a few months; where Jeannette enjoys...
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...The Glass Castle, we are introduced to a family of six and we learn about the parents, Rex and Rose Mary, along with their behavior, attitude, personality, and the overall approach they have towards parenting their children. We all know that the bottom line to "good parenting" is to avoid any type of negligence toward your children. With further study into the book, one may come to the conclusion that Rex and Rose Mary do not fall under the category of "good parent." Rex and Rose Mary do not uphold their moral responsibilities to care for their children's basic needs due to their lack of supervision, stability, and their selfishness. To begin with, Rex and Rose Mary demonstrate a lack of supervision in their parenting throughout The Glass...
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...Walls starts with her memory of being on fire. She writes “I was on fire” at three years old after cooking hot dogs for herself(9). She remembers how she felt, writing “I felt a blaze of heat on my right side . . . the yellow-white flames [making] a ragged brown line . . . then the flames leaped up, reaching my face”(9). Walls shows the reader that she lived in poverty with no one to take care her. Using her childhood as contrast, she writes about what happened after she grew up. She describes how she eventually bought a house and even got money to celebrate Thanksgiving. Walls details the house, explaining that the “wide-plank floorboards, the big fireplaces . . . an Egyptian couch . . . the smell of the roasting turkey John had prepared, with a stuffing of sausage, mushrooms, walnuts, apples”(Walls...
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...The book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls tells the story of Jeannette and her family. Jeannette certainly did not have the easiest life growing up, but she may have had one of the most interesting. I enjoyed the book because the experiences that Jeanette and her family went through make for a very exciting read. These experiences are out of the ordinary and don't represent how a typical American family would live. Jeannette was born into a rather peculiar family. She had a mother and father, and two older siblings, but the way that the family lived made them peculiar. Her parents were not the most cautious of her well being. They believed that their kids should be able to take care of themselves, and that too much parental intervention would lead kids into becoming too dependent. This said, one can imagine how the kids lived. Jeanette and her siblings were constantly in dangerous situations since supervision was limited. Walls even writes that her first memory is being on fire (9). She was making hot dogs over a stove and caught herself on fire. Her mother thought that it was a good idea to let her three year old daughter cook hotdogs over an open fire. She was alright other than a few burns and was hospitalized. Six weeks into her hospitalization her father comes to "check out, Rex Walls-style". He picks her up out of her bed and runs out of the hospital (14). Anecdotes like these are frequent in The Glass Castle. They are not all as tragic as this, but they are all very...
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...society so despised by her father. Growing up, Walls was subjected to her father’s alcohol problems and thus poverty ensued. Exhibiting unwavering loyalty towards her incompetent father, Walls would vigorously defend him against familial and outside antagonizers. Yet after this alliance shattered, she rejects her father’s precepts feeling ashamed of her upbringing and soon after moved to New York. When Jeannette asks her mother about what she should do when people ask about her parents’ situation or her past, her mom said “Just tell the truth” (5). In her memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls...
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...There are many themes throughout The Glass Castle, but one theme that sticks out the most is forgiveness. The act of forgiving someone is sometimes hard for certain people, also depending on the situation. Some people forgive others and some just forget the person and move on with their life. In The Glass Castle there is a family consisting of a mother and a father and children. The kids were raised poorly because of the way their parents lived their life. Despite these kids childhoods they still loved their parents anyway. Forgiveness is shown threw Jeanette’s relationship with her parents, mainly her father, and then the other kid’s relationship with their parents, also The Last Song is a story with the same theme. Jeanette’s father is Rex Walls. Rex has always had a probably with drinking. Growing up Jeanette had always seen her father get drunk and not be able to control himself. She knew that he had a problem very early on in her life. No matter the situation, Jeanette would always stand up for her father and defended him. Rex would let Jeanette down over and over again. It got to a point where Jeanette knew she could fend for both herself and her father, so she chose herself. Even though all the troubles Jeanette went through growing up with Rex as her...
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...Introduction Think back to your childhood, perhaps you remember playing games with siblings or maybe going on a walk with your parents or something fun and happy. And then as you go through life, maybe you realize that playing isn’t as fun and maybe the colors of the earth around you aren’t as vibrant or beautiful as they used to be. That’s growing up, realizing that everything isn’t sunshine and rainbows and not everything works out. In the books The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and the Lord of the Flies by William Golding, kids are forced to mature or grow up because society is unethical. Glass Castle In The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, Jeanette starts as a child who thinks everything is all fun and games and that there is no bad in the world, she thought everything was a fun adventure. One example of Jeanette’s innocence is in the first chapter when she gets set on fire. Instead of freaking out, she jokes around about it and when Rex took her and ran out of the hospital, she thought it was a game. In chapter 2, Jeannette says, “in my mind, Dad was perfect”, even though the reader can clearly tell that Rex is far from perfect....
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...The Glass Castle: Resilience “The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.” –Robert Jordan This quote demonstrates how, in human culture, we must be flexible to change and hardship considering, rather, embracing its certain unavoidability. As a living organism, one is bound to the natural tendency to make mistakes; consequently, one is susceptible to the associated consequence of his/her actions. Concerning the above quote by author Robert Jordan, the previous statement describes the oak tree, such that the inability to adapt to the situation presented before oneself may cause such an internal conflict of resilience that he/she fails to persevere in solving the problem at hand. Supporting...
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...The Glass Castle is a novel that vividly describes the dysfunction of the Walls family. The stories that are described are told by Jeannette Walls who is also the author of the book. In the book, Jeannette describes her life from the age of three years old to adulthood. She tells numerous stories of how her and her family were nomads, and how she managed to escape poverty and become a member of societies middle class. The family lived from city to city and state to state for short periods of time and when things become rocky they would “skedaddle”. The Walls family was highly dysfunctional, and after reading the book it amazed me that anyone could live wandering the states not having any real roots to call home for so long. There are a few things that stood out to me while I was reading Jeannette’s story. The...
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...of saints and martyrs. Large numbers of people moved from one monastery to another creating travel routes which would later become trade routes. Because of this large influx of people, churches were built large enough to hold hundreds of people. Romanesque architecture style was one of the first to build entirely with stone materials instead of wood because stone was the only thing that would support the heavy roofs. The 2 structure was massive, boxy and low to the ground. Round Roman arches, thick walls, and small windows are typical of the buildings. All Romanesque architecture was built to make a statement of power and wealth. Romanesque buildings were not just churches, abbeys, and monasteries; they also encapsulated the castles. These castles were used as power sources and were built to be sturdy and long lasting during times of war. This meant that buildings were serviceable, durable, defensive, and strong, but not very creative. The Gothic style grew out of the Romanesque architectural style, when both prosperity and peace allowed for several centuries of cultural development and great building schemes. Gothic style architecture included grand cathedrals which had tall skyscraper-like towers. This design was deliberate, a way to get people to look up to the sky and think of God. Gothic structures emphasize the vertical and represented faith, dedication, and cooperation. Gothic style has three main...
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