Final Reflection

                In the beginning I had little expectations for this book. I relied on what others thought of it to select the memoir. I believed that this book was going to be hard to read and there were going to be many sad or disturbing scenes that were to be expected. I thought the title “The Glass Castle” could be referring to her house or household shattering since glass was fragile. I also thought the main theme of this book was about her family and her family’s issues. Besides what I wrote in my first blog post I did think that the book was going to make me pity her and make me feel bad for her a majority of the time. When I actually read the book I found I did not pity her, I rather found her life interesting and saw how she developed as a character. Pity did play in a few times when her issues seemed quite extreme but her life was much more inspirational rather than sad.

                I did find I needed to take pauses in the book, for there were many sad or depressing scenes. When compared to other memoirs read in class, or those that I’ve read on my own, is very different but yet still similar. You notice how the protagonist, or the person (in most cases) writing the memoir, over comes the issues and challenges that were present to them in the begging of the novel. In this case for Jeannette it was going to New York and finding her own “Glass Castle”.

Connections to The Glass Castle

To The Boogie Man: (Children)

I used to be afraid of you,
heard you eat up girls and boys.
I didn't want the lights turned out
and I was scared to play with toys.

Then Mommy asked you over.
She told me you're just sad.
You have no one to play with
and you aren't really bad.

You never come to dinner.
We still set a place for you,
a plate, a spoon, a glass for milk,
just in case you do.

-C.J. Heck

In the book The Glass Castle Jeannette thought she heard something under her and her sister’s bed and went to go get her dad. She finds her Dad in the living room and says that she heard a sound. Her father describes a scary monster and Jeannette says that’s who she thinks she saw. They went out to go find “Demon”, the scary ‘Boogie Man’ who was underneath Jeannette’s bed. In this passage she says “Dad said he’d been chasing Demon for years. By now, Dad said that old demon had figured out that it had better not mess with Rex Walls. But if that sneaky son of a gun thought it was going to terrorize Rex Wall’s little girl, it had by God got another think coming” (36). This connects to the poem “To the Boogie Man” by C.J. Heck because it shows how her Dad is comforting her from the ‘Demon’. He’s not denying his existence he’s just reassuring Jeannette and claiming there’s nothing to fear. In the poem it said “Then Mommy asked you over. She told me you're just sad. You have no one to play with and you aren't really bad” When talking about the Boogie Man.  In the book Jeannette and her father hunt down the ‘demon’, who is obviously not real and in the poem they leave a space for him at the dining table so he’s not lonely.

In this book, the Boogie Man or Demon is the least scary thing in Jeannette’s life compared to falling out if a car and being scared that you could be left behind along with many other events occurring in the story. The poem addresses the figurative meaning because its how these things like a boogie monster will not be the worst thing to come and how the boogie monster is just sad and lonely. By saying “I used to be afraid of you,” in the poem applies that things will come in your life that you’ll fear more than a boogie monster. In the book Jeannette's dad says “All you have to do, Mountain Goat, is show them that you’re not afraid”. This shows that once you no longer fear these things they won’t bother you.

Emotional Reaction

                A lot occurs in The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.  In the book so far Jeannette has moved several towns and even states. You can easily uncover that her parents don’t like staying the same place for a very long time. In this book a portion that was difficult for me to read was the little things, mainly how her parents and some of her other family members treat the children or are oblivious to how they are struggling in the story. This occurs many times throughout the story. In the beginning of the book Jeannette came home from being jumped by a bunch of girls after school. She was covered in bruises and cuts since four girls had just beaten her up. When she walked in the door her father casually asked about what happened. When Jeanette told him she had gotten into a fight he said “That’s my girl!”(45) And went back to doing what he was doing.

                The idea of the parents not caring about what happened to their children or the needs of their children is evident again when Lori and Jeannette ate margarine and sugar because they were so hungry and weren’t fed enough. Their mother’s first reaction was anger. She told them “We should have saved the margarine in case the gas gets back on. Miracles happen you know” rather than realizing her children were so hungry that they resorted to eating a margarine stick to keep them slightly satisfied.

Title Signifigence

                The title The Glass Castle in the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls appears many times throughout the book.  The literal meaning of The Glass Castle is a castle made of glass that the Wells family plans on building once they get gold. In the book her dad, Rex Walls, is searching for gold, finding places to live to keep them alive and places where he can work to hopefully find gold. This gold will make him and his family wealthy and with that money he will build a glass castle. She said “once he finished the Prospector and we struck rich, he’d start to work on our Glass Castle” (25).  Rex and his family spent most of the book chasing this dream and planning out their Glass Castle although the idea itself was ridiculous. At one point they thought they were so close that they begin planning it.

                The figurative meaning of the title The Glass Castle is also present in the book. The figurative meaning I’ve uncovered is an unrealistic dream set by Rex but he believes its achievable. In the book they had a cat named Quixote. Jeannette talked about Quixote briefly when she said “They might decide that it wasn’t worth the drive back to retrieve me; that , like Quixote the cat, I was a bother and a burden.”. The name of the cat, Quixote, was taken from Don Quixote. I found out that Don Quixote is a man who had ridiculous dreams and planned on chasing them, not realizing how unrealistic they were. The significance of the cat being named Quixote was how Rex’s dream of building a Glass Castle was ridiculous.

The Glass Castle is also symbolic for hope. The Glass Castle gives Jeannette and her family a sense that one day her life will be good and she’ll live in a mansion with her family. Although many times the dream didn’t seem evident, especially when they were starving or they had no money they still kept hoping for that castle in the desert. Towards the end of the book they were close but the foundation for the Glass Castle became covered in trash yet that didn’t discourage them.  At the end of the book she said “And I’ll build the Glass Castle, I swear it. We’ll all live in it together”(238) to her father when he was trying to get her out of going to New York, giving him hope and showing that she’ll carry on the dream he’s always had.

Passage Analysis: Page 35

“I thought the Joshua tree was ugly. It looked scraggly and freakish, permanently stuck in its twisted, tortured position, and it made you think of how sometimes adults tell you not to make weird faces because your features could freeze. Mom, however, thought it was one of the most beautiful trees she had ever seen. She told us she had to paint it.” (35)

                A Joshua tree is an ugly tree that is made to survive in the harsh conditions of the desert. In this passage Jeannette discusses how ugly this tree was but how her mom saw beauty within that tree. The Joshua tree is a symbol for Jeannette’s family. Her family is “scraggly”, and permanently in a tough position from moving around and having parents that don’t properly take care of the kids. They may not be in great shape but it represents how they are made to survive. Throughout all the things they’ve been through they’re still alive.

In the book Jeannette said “all of us kids were scrawny and sunburned and wore faded shorts and raggedy shirts and shoes with holes or no shoes at all” (58-59).  Here Jeannette describes herself along with the kids of her neighborhood as “scrawny”. She also describes how they look raggedy or not well kept. This is similar to how she describe the tree as “scraggly and freakish” in the passage on page 35. From this you could infer that in this passage Jeanette is comparing her family to a tree.