The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls Summary

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls tell about young Jeanette’s life living with her family. They’re poor,hungry and living in bad conditions. It tells about how she get’s out of the life she’s living, and makes something of herself in New York. In this excerpt, Jeannette’s family moves into a new house in Welch, after Jeanette’s father’s mother kicks them out of her basement. Jeanette’s mother tries to use her positive thinking to help her children deal with the poor conditions they live in, but she’s actually just hiding her problems. The author conveys that her mother’s positive thinking is only hiding their real problems by using the literary element, characterization. An example that demonstrates the mother’s use of positive thinking to hide their problems is when the mother tries to liven up their house by using glass bottles to make it look like they have stained glass. “Mom also built
She never wanted a job, because she thought her art career was going to bloom out of nowhere. It seemed like she would spend money on art supplies when her kids were hungry, wearing dirty clothing, or being very cold.She thought her artwork made the house better for everyone, and would ‘perk’ it up. “Since Mom had more paintings than we had wall space, Dad nailed long shelf brackets to the wall, and she hung one picture in front of another until they were three or four deep. Then she’d rotate the paintings. “Just a little redecorating to perk the place up,” she’d say. But I believed she thought of her paintings as children and wanted them to feel that they were all being treated equally.”(Walls 154) Instead of fixing the house, instead of buying better clothes or better beds for her children, she’s buying art supplies to paint pictures so her artwork can ‘perk the place up’. It’s not helping in the least. Her postive thinking about her painting’s, about having to perk the place up doesn’t help her or her children at