Character Analysis: The Glass Castle

With reading each chapter of the Glass Castle, I could relate more and more too each story the author told. Throughout the novel, Jeannette Walls childhood is characterized by the disorder and confusion of flawed parents and their chaotic lifestyle. Although her parents were irresponsible and careless, somehow they managed to instill in their children commendable qualities that led to them becoming well-adjusted adults. Through the dysfunction of their childhood, Jeanette and her siblings learned to be resilient, independent and ultimately how to survive. My childhood too had a period of dysfunction and chaos. Although my parents were not irresponsible and careless like Rose-Mary and Rex, they did not possess the ability to relate or teach how to go about obtaining values and knowledge that would be needed to live a stable adult life. Similarly to how Jeanette and her sibling bound together to better their situation …show more content…
For instance, the children would take care of their parents so they were able to function outside the home. This is apparent when the children made their mother take a job as a teacher. When Rose-Mary was on the verge of losing the job because she was constantly unreliable, the kids took charge. Jeanette recollected, “Miss Beatty threatened to fire mom, so Lori, Brian and I, started helping mom with school work (Walls 74). They then began to wake, clothe and feed their mother. They also did her actual job by cleaning her classroom, grading her assignments and making her lesson plans. Inadvertently, Rose-Mary provided her children with the experience of what is required to succeed at a job. My circumstance never called for actions this drastic. However, my parents’ inability to teach us how to prepare in academics allowed us to learn on our own and now have the ability to have that knowledge for our