Comparing Jeannette Walls 'Glass Castle And' The Liars
Most memoirs are written with the intention of telling the author’s significant experiences, each conveying their individual purpose. In both Jeannette Walls’, The Glass Castle, and Mary Karr’s, The Liars Club, the authors utilize their dysfunctional childhoods to achieve their independent purposes. Walls uses numerous strategies to achieve her purpose of the memoir being a way to accept the past and to not let the past define oneself. Unlike Walls, Karr also uses her strategies to show the endurance of love and family through thick and thin. Together both novels are able to tell their own individual stories and get through to the readers utilizing contrasting strategies.
Walls has trouble hard time accepting the truth of her childhood …show more content…
She tells countless stories of her father and the liar’s club, a group of men sitting around and telling their life stories. Karr recognizes her father’s lies, but sits quietly. As a child she was exposed to many of her parents fights, recalling, “we’d go...to see who'd thrown what or who passed out” (Karr 39). Her mother was mentally unstable, pulling a butcher knife on the children and even burning their clothes. After all they had witnessed through their mother's deteriorating state of mind, they still chose to live with her during the divorce. Their loyalty to their mother shows the endurance of love and family, where not even a knife to them can scare them away. Walls also uses anecdotes, but to achieve an entirely different purpose. Walls tells story of each of the many places she moved around with her family, each consistent with their bad living conditions. Her summer was not filled with vacations and water parks as other kids, yet still enjoyed it because “each day we had more light to read by” (Walls 168). She recognized that this was not her ideal life, and had always been set on making a better life for herself until she could finally say the words “I actually live on Park Avenue” (Walls 268). Her anecdotes showed the reader that the past does not define oneself, and one can make himself into something greater than what they were raised to
Walls has trouble hard time accepting the truth of her childhood …show more content…
She tells countless stories of her father and the liar’s club, a group of men sitting around and telling their life stories. Karr recognizes her father’s lies, but sits quietly. As a child she was exposed to many of her parents fights, recalling, “we’d go...to see who'd thrown what or who passed out” (Karr 39). Her mother was mentally unstable, pulling a butcher knife on the children and even burning their clothes. After all they had witnessed through their mother's deteriorating state of mind, they still chose to live with her during the divorce. Their loyalty to their mother shows the endurance of love and family, where not even a knife to them can scare them away. Walls also uses anecdotes, but to achieve an entirely different purpose. Walls tells story of each of the many places she moved around with her family, each consistent with their bad living conditions. Her summer was not filled with vacations and water parks as other kids, yet still enjoyed it because “each day we had more light to read by” (Walls 168). She recognized that this was not her ideal life, and had always been set on making a better life for herself until she could finally say the words “I actually live on Park Avenue” (Walls 268). Her anecdotes showed the reader that the past does not define oneself, and one can make himself into something greater than what they were raised to