Assignment #3 The Glass Castle Pt 1
For our newest assignment our Professor has tasked us with commenting on the Memoir The Glass Castle. Not sure how much you will enjoy this if you haven't read it but I am sure you can google the book and get a general idea.
Ciao
Commentary on Glass Castle pt 1
Pages 1-41
This memoir starts out with a drastic contradiction with no explanation which really catches the reader’s attention. The writer, Jeannette Wells, (who lives on Park Avenue) sees her mother rifling thru garbage. Jeannette witnesses this while sitting in a cab that is taking her to a trendy party. She hadn’t seen her mother in a while but even so she could not get out of the cab to say hello or to offer any help. She would of felt horrible if one of her friends had seen her talking to this homeless person who to top it all off is her mother.
In the first chapter she delves (though not very deeply) into her own embarrassment of her mother’s living situation, and as the author will display, her mother's delusional nature. It seems that this contrast will be a central theme in this memoir. In addition to the cab incident, there is story about how Jeannette contacts her mother and tries to offer her some money so she can get off her feet. The mother, homeless in NYC, responds by asking for her daughter to pay for hair removal treatments.
In the second chapter the author uses literary shock and awe. She tells the story of her earliest memory, being burned while cooking. She cleverly goes into detail about boiling hot dogs (a food children often eat) and how she tries to feed it to the family dog (showing innocence and/or playfulness of youth) and how the mother is painting (displaying the creative aloofness of the mother) to build an image for the reader. At this moment the audience has visualized an endearing family moment forgetting for a instant that this is a 3 year old girl cooking while at the same time her mother is in the other room knowingly letting this happen!
Right after the hot dog episode the author starts favorably comparing her experience being in the burn unit of a hospital to that of her home life. She describes as she enjoys her own room and TV and the peace and quiet of the hospital. We start to see how her home life must have been like. As you read on however, you find out there wasn’t much a home life at all. The writer’s tales of going from town to town (Nevada, Arizona, California and back again) and of her father (Rex Wells) trying to build a device called the Prospector (to look for gold) are beyond belief. Thru her descriptions of her father the reader starts to grasp that he is a genius who at the same time is a nomad, gypsy and a bohemian.
There are also stories about his excessive drinking and gambling. The drinking problems are not really written about in detail as of yet, but the gambling is. The story about the family going to Las Vegas is quite amusing. The father always the risk taker comes up with a scheme to cheat the casinos. This enables him to do more than his share of winning and at the same time makes him suspicious. He is found out and his family is forced once again to “pull up stakes”.
The writer makes a point of sharing with the reader many instances of the father sharing stories of his personal accomplishments, (making the daughter feel more confident in him)and also telling stories to give her self confidence to survive in a harsh world (the story about “demon” -the snake under her bed- is a good example of both). This seems to paint for the reader a picture of a father who knows that his choice of lifestyle is unorthodox and that his children have to be prepared for the challenges it brings.
There isn’t much written about the mother so far. We are told how the mother and father met and that she was in the USO but not much else. There is however a snapshot into her persona. As they are driving away from another town (“pulling up stakes”) the mother makes the family stop the car because she sees a Joshua tree she wants to paint. She then decides the family should live there, in a town hundreds of miles away from a major city but “smack dab in the middle of nowhere”. The mother’s temporary happiness seems to be the lone deciding factor in her decision making process, let’s hope the writer goes into this more.
Questions so far:
1. Is the mother really so aloof? Does she not care about her children’s and her insecure lifestyle? Does she secretly want a more stable life?
2. Do the parents share a mental disorder at this early stage? It doesn’t seem like they were brought up as nomads but they certainly don’t seem certifiable either, at this point.
3. If the mother and father loved to live so free and travel so much why did they have children?
4. Are the parents religious at all or just “extremist hippies”?
What I am starting to realize is the mother and father are painting this picture of family life being an adventure strictly for the children’s benefit. This still does not explain the mother’s aloofness, let’s hope the author goes into this more.
Ciao
Commentary on Glass Castle pt 1
Pages 1-41
This memoir starts out with a drastic contradiction with no explanation which really catches the reader’s attention. The writer, Jeannette Wells, (who lives on Park Avenue) sees her mother rifling thru garbage. Jeannette witnesses this while sitting in a cab that is taking her to a trendy party. She hadn’t seen her mother in a while but even so she could not get out of the cab to say hello or to offer any help. She would of felt horrible if one of her friends had seen her talking to this homeless person who to top it all off is her mother.
In the first chapter she delves (though not very deeply) into her own embarrassment of her mother’s living situation, and as the author will display, her mother's delusional nature. It seems that this contrast will be a central theme in this memoir. In addition to the cab incident, there is story about how Jeannette contacts her mother and tries to offer her some money so she can get off her feet. The mother, homeless in NYC, responds by asking for her daughter to pay for hair removal treatments.
In the second chapter the author uses literary shock and awe. She tells the story of her earliest memory, being burned while cooking. She cleverly goes into detail about boiling hot dogs (a food children often eat) and how she tries to feed it to the family dog (showing innocence and/or playfulness of youth) and how the mother is painting (displaying the creative aloofness of the mother) to build an image for the reader. At this moment the audience has visualized an endearing family moment forgetting for a instant that this is a 3 year old girl cooking while at the same time her mother is in the other room knowingly letting this happen!
Right after the hot dog episode the author starts favorably comparing her experience being in the burn unit of a hospital to that of her home life. She describes as she enjoys her own room and TV and the peace and quiet of the hospital. We start to see how her home life must have been like. As you read on however, you find out there wasn’t much a home life at all. The writer’s tales of going from town to town (Nevada, Arizona, California and back again) and of her father (Rex Wells) trying to build a device called the Prospector (to look for gold) are beyond belief. Thru her descriptions of her father the reader starts to grasp that he is a genius who at the same time is a nomad, gypsy and a bohemian.
There are also stories about his excessive drinking and gambling. The drinking problems are not really written about in detail as of yet, but the gambling is. The story about the family going to Las Vegas is quite amusing. The father always the risk taker comes up with a scheme to cheat the casinos. This enables him to do more than his share of winning and at the same time makes him suspicious. He is found out and his family is forced once again to “pull up stakes”.
The writer makes a point of sharing with the reader many instances of the father sharing stories of his personal accomplishments, (making the daughter feel more confident in him)and also telling stories to give her self confidence to survive in a harsh world (the story about “demon” -the snake under her bed- is a good example of both). This seems to paint for the reader a picture of a father who knows that his choice of lifestyle is unorthodox and that his children have to be prepared for the challenges it brings.
There isn’t much written about the mother so far. We are told how the mother and father met and that she was in the USO but not much else. There is however a snapshot into her persona. As they are driving away from another town (“pulling up stakes”) the mother makes the family stop the car because she sees a Joshua tree she wants to paint. She then decides the family should live there, in a town hundreds of miles away from a major city but “smack dab in the middle of nowhere”. The mother’s temporary happiness seems to be the lone deciding factor in her decision making process, let’s hope the writer goes into this more.
Questions so far:
1. Is the mother really so aloof? Does she not care about her children’s and her insecure lifestyle? Does she secretly want a more stable life?
2. Do the parents share a mental disorder at this early stage? It doesn’t seem like they were brought up as nomads but they certainly don’t seem certifiable either, at this point.
3. If the mother and father loved to live so free and travel so much why did they have children?
4. Are the parents religious at all or just “extremist hippies”?
What I am starting to realize is the mother and father are painting this picture of family life being an adventure strictly for the children’s benefit. This still does not explain the mother’s aloofness, let’s hope the author goes into this more.
posted by djshoghi at
7:30 PM
