Homelessness In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

Life Without a Glass Castle While reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, several themes began to pop up periodically throughout the book which dealt with social issues including alcoholism, bullying, poverty, and neglect. She gives great detail about the main events in her life and how she was molded into the human being she is today. These difficulties contributed to the family’s struggle to maintain stability, and Jeannette’s family moved frequently when she was growing up. In a five year span, they moved a total of twenty-seven times. Between moving house to house, they lived out of their vehicles for a while. Jeannette Walls tells us about her homeless childhood in The Glass Castle and many people today deal with the same types of struggles. Homelessness is often misunderstood because there are many definitions and there are multiple words that sound similar or have similar definitions. The United Nations broke up homelessness into two broad groups. Primary Homelessness includes people
Jeannette’s Mom said “Being homeless is an adventure. (The Glass Castle)” This is just one of the few things that the parents said to appeal to the children that being homeless was not so bad. The parents said it so often that they started to believe it themselves and at times in the novel enjoyed being homeless. Some people would say the reason why the Walls were homeless was because the parents were suffering from a mental illness, but there are multiple reasons why they were living on the streets. Rex could not hold a job and Rose Mary did not like to work unless the kids were about to starve to death. Rex was always gambling away their money and had a drinking problem while Rose Mary had a sugar addiction. These are just a few of the reasons why the Walls were homeless, but the list could go on for a