The Glass Castle Blog Post #2 (The Voice)

In The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls (the author) looks on the bright side in many of the stories she tells about her childhood.  When she was younger, Walls experienced many traumatic experiences.  So far in the book she has fallen out of the car, caught on fire, been starving and freezing multiple times, and had to deal with her drunk father (also multiple times).  Yet in all of these instances, Walls has managed to not make the situation seem as bad as it was, either by using humor or just highlighting the better parts.  For example, when Walls caught on fire at the age of three while she was boiling hotdogs, most of that story was spent talking about the hospital with the nice nurses, tasty gum, and tv shows she got to watch.  She never complained or talked about how her parents shouldn't have let her boil hotdogs so young.  And when her dad basically kidnapped her from the hospital, even when she was still recovering, she talked about how her dad made her feel safe.  I think that the reason she used this writing style is to show how she thought and felt about those moments when she was a child.  When you are a young child, you look up to your parents and see them as people who are always right and know everything.  Walls also felt like that when she was younger and that is why she doesn't talk much about how bad her parents' problems were.  Using this style really brings you into the story because you can see how Walls truly felt during her younger memories in the story.  If Walls had used her current opinion of her parents and childhood in her story, I bet her parents' flaws and bad decisions would have been highlighted more because as an adult, she most likely sees how dangerous and bad some of her parents' decisions were.