Personal Review

After being mesmerized by the less than perfect childhood memories of Jeanette Walls and her family in The Glass Castle, I realized that hope is the only kind of light that will never burn out. Not only did Jeanette and siblings keep their flame of hope kindled despite harsh living conditions and severe parental issues, but they managed to thrive in New York City as authors, illustrators, and firefighters. That little spark of hope on Walls’ fingertips just happened to travel like wildfire and warm the hearts of millions of readers, myself included. I was in complete admiration of the resilience and bravery that guided the light of the children literally from rags to riches.

A significant element of the novel that I very much appreciated was, strangely, the lack of deep, flowery diction and syntax. Instead of providing every emotion in writing on each page, by merely stating the details, the readers could fill in the gaps with emotion. While Walls could have easily spoon-fed readers the intended reaction of each painful anecdote, this gap she leaves provides space for each reader to insert a personal response. For example, when Jeanette recalls seeing her Grandma Erma groping the younger brother Brian, this could have ignited an array of reactions from the readers. I was awestruck, since I know of nothing other than grandparents who are the utmost loving people. Yet, someone who had been molested or abused by a family member during childhood would have had a completely different reaction.

Symbols

Every time the family moves, Jeanette’s precious rock collection dwindles. With every beloved stone she leaves behind, she is leaving a little piece of herself. Despite a less than perfect life, Jeanette had her collection of beautiful geodes and crystals to harness her pride. Not only did these rocks act as a small ray of light in her otherwise dull life, but they were the one element of her life that would always be stable. While packing up their belongings to embark on another spontaneous relocation, her father insisted that she could “only bring one” (Walls 90), and leave the rest of her rocks, and hope, at Battle Mountain. However, instead of reluctantly abiding to her father’s request, she took her favorite geode and looked into the new horizon. This demonstrates that the rock collection also symbolizes Jeanette’s willingness to let go and become adaptable to a new environment or circumstance.

“It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives is beauty” (Walls 38). As the Walls family travels through the desert to the location of their next home, they stop and stare at a beautifully deformed Joshua tree, with its branches morphed as if it was reaching into the sun. Similarly to themselves, the tree was a victim of a supposedly horrible past bent and twisted by sharp desert winds and scarred by fierce sand storms. The Walls were mesmerized by the tree, merely because it was a glimpse into their own lives-they were emotionally withered from memories of a tough past, yet they still looked in the direction of hope. The Joshua tree signified hope, in that both the Walls family and the tree were not thriving, but still existing.

Themes/Motifs

With an unstable mother and alcoholic father, the Walls children matured very quickly in order to establish order and responsibility in their household. Jeanette Walls established this significant loss of innocence that was essential in the maintenance of a family through her gradually evolving style. While staying in the hospital being treated for a burn incident, the youthful Jeanette notes, “I would have been happy staying in that hospital forever” (Walls 12). Although she allows her naivety to shine through during her early childhood years, this naivety quickly grew into maturity, to assume her crucial role as care-taker for her younger siblings. Throughout her teen years, Jeanette and her siblings took advantage of every opportunity to bring home any amount of money for their family-an aspect that her parents never understood. Jeanette considered that “there’s one thing about whoring: It put a chicken on the table” (Walls 163). She did not grasp during her childhood that people went to desperate measures to make end’s meet for their families, but her gradual loss of innocence allowed her to comprehend this. For the Walls children, their youth was flooded with an overwhelming dose of maturity-as portrayed as an important theme in the novel.

The Walls family, for as long as they were together, always barely managed to linger on the fine line of normalcy and disruption. As soon as the children would be settled in a new school or new home, the father would announce another relocation. When Jeanette finally had faith that her father would discontinue his drinking habits, he would return back to alcoholism. Acting as a concluding reflection on her past, Walls depicts “the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order” (Walls 288). Even though the children had managed to break free from the “turbulence” of their childhood, the limits of their memories would never allow them to fully establish success or “order” in their lives.

Character

Jeanette Walls’ father, Rex Walls, exemplifies the common saying that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Raised in a poor household where he was frequently molested by his mother, Rex struggled to balance scarring childhood memories, alcoholism, and his family. As he fought to keep his head above the water, his unusual tactics, unreliability, and severe alcohol addiction took a major toll on the upbringing of his children. Although the children were in absolute admiration of their father’s fearlessness and “tough guy” persona, Jeanette Walls conveys the gradual withdrawal of appreciation for their father.

In the opening of the novel, during the early childhood of Jeanette and her siblings, it was clearly conveyed that the wide-eyed and naïve Walls children considered their father as the epitome of a role model. Rex assured his children that despite his unstable jobs and constant trouble with the police and alcohol, he would fulfill their every hope and dream with the creation of the glass castle. This childish admiration is displayed through a hopeful tone-“All this running around and moving was temporary, Dad explained. He had a plan. He was going to find gold” (Walls 22). Eventually, when the children realized that the blueprints for the glass castle would never become an actual standing structure, they lost faith in their father. Although it was never built, the significance of the glass castle to the father extended deeper than sheets of glass-it was the structure that harnessed his shattered hopes, dreams, and memories.

Readers witnessed the downward spiral of his sobriety and loyalty, as it was paralleled in the language and tone in the novel. As the plans for the glass castle fell through, so did the father. When the light shining through the glass died out, the spark of hope in the father would never be ignited again.

Rhetorical Strategies

-Antithesis: “I was embarrassed by them, too, and ashamed of myself for wearing pearls and living on Park Avenue while my parents were busy keeping warm and finding something to eat” (Walls 4).

-Pathos: “Mom told me she had entered my name in a raffle at the fair, and I’d won a helicopter ride. I was thrilled. I had never been in a helicopter or plane. ‘When do I get to go on that ride?’ I asked. ‘Oh, we already did that,’ Mom said. ‘It was fun.’ “ (Walls 13).

“I breathed in his familiar smell of Vitalis, whiskey, and cigarette smoke. It reminded me of home” (Walls 14).

-Situational Irony: “Mom hated being the teacher’s daughter” (Walls 91) [Ironic because mother becomes teacher despite this hatred.]

“But I believed she thought of her paintings as children and wanted them to feel that they were all being treated equal” (Walls 154).

-Parallel Structure: “He was bathing in it, wallowing in it, positively luxuriating in it, his flickering tail hanging over the side of the bowl, flinging sugar across the table” (Walls 155).

Rhetorical strategies play an instrumental role in Jeanette Walls’ novel to convey the terrors of her childhood, yet the hope and strength it instilled in her. Antithesis and irony play a major part in displaying the uniquely defined roles of the parental forces and children in her family. Utilizing antithesis, Walls explains that instead of living a normal carefree childhood, she and her siblings were forced to take on the roles of guardians and decision makers. With an alcoholic father and selfish mother, there was a gap of guidance in the Walls household, leaving the children to invade their youthful years with maturity. As the years went on, Jeanette and her siblings managed to rise in means of success, while the parents continued to drive themselves lower and lower into homelessness. This factor of the novel, as interpreted by Walls, is ironically significant in that parents should be role models for their children’s future, yet the surprising and heartwarming success of the Walls children clearly outshined that of the parents. Through pathos, Walls brings to life the unspoken abuse that the children underwent. Although she barely ever literally retells the pain, she suggests a reflection on the hardships. However, it is what is not stated that invokes the most emotion from the reader. As Walls physically grows up throughout the novel, she parallels her writing style and emotion in unison-injecting more pathos and deeper glimpses into her heart at her most mature phases.