TOW #8 - The Glass Castle

In Jeannette Walls’s memoir, The Glass Castle, Walls adequately shares her life experiences to her audience. After graduating from Barnard, Walls moves into a new home with her boyfriend Eric and finally accepts her parents’ decision to live in an abandoned building. Walls’s parents are satisfied with their lifestyle, and Walls recognizes they have finally found a home with similar people. Walls’s sister, stabs her mother after being kicked out of her parents’ home. The entire family attends the hearing and argues the cause of Maureen’s mental state. This argument created a further drift between the family relationship. After a long period of time, Jeannette Walls’s father passes away due to a heart attack. Their last conversation made Walls realize her father truly loved her no matter what happened throughout their lives. Five years after her father dies, she left Eric and married John who encouraged her to reconnect with her family for thanksgiving. During this dinner, it is evident that the family still holds anger towards the parents but Jeannette Walls convinces her siblings to leave their anger behind and focus on a better future. Jeanette Walls graduated from Barnard in 1984 and worked for the New York magazine and MSNBC. Walls also uses her life experiences to create credibility. Walls’s audience is anyone who grew up with a difficult childhood. Walls wants to express to her audience that there can be better opportunities for people even if it seems impossible at the time. The rhetorical device used through Walls’s memoir are juxtaposition and symbolism. The juxtaposition is used when Walls described how her parents were living in an abandoned building but lived with all of their belongings compared to Walls’s life in a home filled with all of Eric’s belongings. The most important symbolism in the memoir is The Glass Castle. It symbolizes Walls’s ideal house as she grew up in a damaged family. I believe that Walls effectively achieved her purpose because she is able to prove to her audience that even living with a difficult childhood, a person can live a successful life.