Running Head: Book Summary-The Glass Castle Book Summary: The Glass Castle TU ID: 0566039 FMST 201 1 Book Summary- The Glass Castle 2 THE GLASS CASTLE: BY JEANNETTE WALLS Summary of the Book This book is in the form of a memoir written and narrated by Jeannette Walls. As she rides in a taxi in New York City, heading to an event, she looks outside through the window and gets a glimpse of her mother. Her mother was digging through the street trash. Even though her mother has been living homeless for several years, Jeannette is engulfed in a great sense of shame about her mother’s life. The shame prompts her to begin an inner reflection of her childhood, and how her parents’ choices in life were affecting her. She narrates her childhood; since she was three years; standing on top of a chair trying to reach the stove to boil her hotdog. Her dress accidentally catches fire, and she gets terribly burnt. Her dad visits her in hospital after a few days, lifts her out of bed and they escape without paying the hospital bill. Much of Walls’ childhood memories in the desert are focused on that hospital escape, and how her family (Dad, Mum, Lori, Brian, Maureen, and finally herself) move from several desert townships, and settling for as far as the father holds a job. They, however, are forced to move frequently, as a result of Rex (the father) alcoholism and paranoia about organized society and the state. They settle down in Battle Mountain; a small mining town in Nevada; for some months. Jeannette and Brian (brother) spend many of their hours exploring the desert. Mrs. Walls (the mother) takes a sabbatical from her projects in arts to work as a teacher. However, an altercation with law enforcers forces the family to move to Phoenix, where Mrs. Walls had an inherited house. Book Summary- The Glass Castle 3 The family gets some stability in Phoenix. The house is big enough, and the children are enrolled in school. Mr. Walls manages to keep some steady electrician jobs. However, alcoholism gets the best of him shortly. Jeannette, so upset by her father’s behavior, asks him to give up alcohol for her tenth birthday. This makes him quit drinking for some weeks. One day their car breaks down in the desert, making the family accept help from a stranger to ride back to Phoenix. This makes Dad go back to alcohol to bury his shame. After some time in Phoenix, Mrs. walls searching for more adventure proposes they move to Welch in West Virginia. This is where the father had grown up. Her thinking is that his family will help them. This does not go well with the father, although he eventually gives in and agrees to move. Life in Welch happens to be much depressing than they expected. Dad’s mom is such an abusive woman. She takes sexual advantage of Brian, justifying it by arguing that she also did abuse Dad when he was young. Welch is an impoverished town that does not always welcome visitors. Mum and Dad buy some shack on a hill for the family. However, Mr. Walls drinking gets worse, to the extent that the children even go hungry. As Jeannette enters her adolescence, she critically thinks of her parents’ choices and concludes that they were irresponsible. Alongside her older sister, Lori, they plan to escape home. Lori is to move to New York City after her graduation, and Jeannette will follow her. Despite some setbacks, they eventually accomplish their mission. In New York, Jeannette quickly gets a job, working as a reporter, her dream in life. Together with Lori, they get a good life. They later ask their siblings, Brian, and Maureen, to Book Summary- The Glass Castle 4 move in with them. They enjoy their life together. Feeling abandoned, Dad and Mom move to New York City. Both Dad and Mom are not willing to keep a steady job. They eventually end up becoming squatters in some abandoned building. Lori, Jeannette, and Brian can get jobs and have stable lives. However, Maureen cannot care for herself, and once acts insane to stab Mom. She later ends up in a mental hospital. The family separates. Mr. Walls is dying of his smoking and drinking. He later dies of heart attack. After the father’s death, Jeannette examines her life, realizing that although she has pushed aside her past and her parents, there is a part of her that depends on the freedom they gave her. She, therefore, divorces her husband, moves on and finds peace with her past and present. Summary of the Social Issues Presented The book presents several social issues. The key social issue being addressed has to do with child care and general parenting styles . In Jeanette’s older years, there is a constant trend in change of her feelings towards her parents. She is resentful of her Dad’s drinking and how he has constantly let the entire family suffer as a consequence. She is also palming? the Mom for refusing to hold a job for long, to provide for her kids what they need. It is these resentments that end up making her more independent and willful. Her dissatisfactions gave her enough reason to scrape enough money to live the kind of life she dreamt of, a successful reporter. She is, however, often haunted by her past, at times even uncomfortable with the transition from poverty to the upper-income class. Book Summary- The Glass Castle 5 How parents behave while bringing up children, the choices they made then and their attitude towards life has so much a bearing on the lives of their children. How? Dad appears completely irresponsible by allowing alcoholism to take precedence over his family. Mom is also an irresponsible mother. Given that she understood Dad better than anybody else, it is expected that she would at least hold a job longer to be able to provide for her children. She appears to value adventure over her children’s welfare. Child neglect put Lori and Jeannette’s lives at a great life risk. A teenager and an adolescent feel that living with their parents was a bigger risk in life than moving to New York City by themselves. They start living in a city with their naivety. Sexual abuse of children is another social factor clearly shown in this book. Dad id depicted as a very intelligent man, who has passion for logic. He is a skilled engineer and electrician. He is said to spend his free time inventing things like contraptions, with the home of making his family rich. He is painted as an independent thinker, who gets paranoid of the United States government. To him, any organized system is a conspiracy. We are told that he suffered some sexual abuse in her childhood. It is this troubled past that probably led him into alcoholism, making him unable to uphold his natural ideals. At the end of the book, we learn that Jeannette, despite her stable life and a well-paying job is still haunted by her past. A past of a hard life occasioned by the decisions made years back by her parents. Analysis of the Decision-Making Process and Resolution Planning Book Summary- The Glass Castle 6 Mom is painted as a free spirit, whose chief value is self-sufficiency. She is seen as a person who has little compassion for people who always complain about their situation. She believes that people have the ability to make of their lives whatever they want. She is an artist who spent much of her spare time drawing and painting. In college, she studied teaching, but she hated the profession. To her, working as a teacher is a show that one is not talented. She is seen to resent her children since they appear to stand between her and her dreams of being a bohemian artist. This description of Mom gives us a chain of decisions that she had to make, decisions that turned out to be all wrong. First, she chose to go to college to study a course she never liked. It is for this decision that she could never hold a teaching job for long. Her resentment for children, under the guise of them blocking her dreams, is also a product of another of her choices. She made the choice to get married and have children while she was perhaps not prepared for it. Good point. Another illustration of a decision-making process came when Lori and Jeannette decided to run away from home to New York City, in a bid to make their lives better. What they were going through at home led them to make this decision, and eventually the decision seems to have been the best they could ever make in their life. Critical Reflection A look at Mom and carrying out a critical reflection of her choices and decisions, one feels that given a chance, it would be sensible for her to do the following things differently from how she did them. First, she should have gone to college and study arts, which appears to be her passion and from pursuing this she would have recognized her position in life and be able to fully exploit it. Second, she should not have gotten married if she was not ready for childbirth Book Summary- The Glass Castle 7 and the responsibilities that come after bringing children, especially with her husband situation and how he is addicted to alcoholic. This is what lead her to be a disorganized person and was not able to rise up Jeannette in an appropriate way. Given that she had already had children, she should have accepted that things were finally different and live the life as it had presented itself. Having resentments towards her children did her more harm than good. Lastly, she should have held on the teaching job a little bit longer to take at least care of her children, given the alcoholic lifestyle of her husband. This would have ensured that the family was stable. Book Summary- The Glass Castle 8
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