How much do you trust your parents? Your siblings? The people around you? How far would you follow them, no matter what happens? These are questions asked by Jeannette Walls thousands of times in her upraising, as she struggles with her life in extreme poverty, raised by an unpredictable, alcoholic father and a fickle, temperamental mother, always moving around. However, as time goes on and she becomes older and older, her innocence is quickly stripped away from her by the harsh life she was born into, and her hopes and attitudes change dramatically. As she questions her fate with her parents, as their prosperity falls even further, and as she finally understand the dark elements of her life previously unseen by her innocent eyes as a child,
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At this stage in her life, she is innocent, carefree, optimistic, and sees her life and everything in it with a positive light. She ses the life ahead of her as, like her father told her, an “adventure.” She was happy to go along with the “skedaddle” and go wherever her father led their family to. She had absolute trust in her parents, thinking they were perfect; that they could do no wrong. For example, as a child, she states “In my mind, Dad was perfect, although he did have what Mom called a little bit of a drinking situation….But Dad drank hard liquor only when we had money, which wasn’t often, so life was mostly good in those days (Walls 23)” This insight into Jeannette’s thoughts as a young child shows that at that moment, she adored her father, basically had no problem with the fact that they didn’t have much money, and thought that the life that she was leading was decent. At this point in time, she is living pretty happily, without many worries and thinking that she could “live like this forever” (Walls 18). An extremely powerful symbol of the book, which is referenced many times throughout, is the Glass Castle, a house that Jeannette’s father, Rex Walls, is planning to build, once they get a bit more money. In early childhood, Jeannette truly believes in the dream of the Glass Castle, trusting her Dad to build it. “When Dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle….. Sometimes he’d pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms” (Walls 25). Jeannette’s attitudes toward the Glass Castle are a good representation of her trust towards her dad and her hopes and dreams, and in childhood, Jeannette has absolute trust. This part of her life, especially on the Christmas when Rex gives her Venus, is the epitome of her life with her family, when everything seems
At this stage in her life, she is innocent, carefree, optimistic, and sees her life and everything in it with a positive light. She ses the life ahead of her as, like her father told her, an “adventure.” She was happy to go along with the “skedaddle” and go wherever her father led their family to. She had absolute trust in her parents, thinking they were perfect; that they could do no wrong. For example, as a child, she states “In my mind, Dad was perfect, although he did have what Mom called a little bit of a drinking situation….But Dad drank hard liquor only when we had money, which wasn’t often, so life was mostly good in those days (Walls 23)” This insight into Jeannette’s thoughts as a young child shows that at that moment, she adored her father, basically had no problem with the fact that they didn’t have much money, and thought that the life that she was leading was decent. At this point in time, she is living pretty happily, without many worries and thinking that she could “live like this forever” (Walls 18). An extremely powerful symbol of the book, which is referenced many times throughout, is the Glass Castle, a house that Jeannette’s father, Rex Walls, is planning to build, once they get a bit more money. In early childhood, Jeannette truly believes in the dream of the Glass Castle, trusting her Dad to build it. “When Dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle….. Sometimes he’d pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms” (Walls 25). Jeannette’s attitudes toward the Glass Castle are a good representation of her trust towards her dad and her hopes and dreams, and in childhood, Jeannette has absolute trust. This part of her life, especially on the Christmas when Rex gives her Venus, is the epitome of her life with her family, when everything seems