Lori, Jeannette, and Brian save all the money they earn from odd jobs around Welch. One day, Jeannette comes home to find her piggy bank slashed and all the money gone. Dad vehemently denies stealing it and then disappears for three days. In the end, Jeannette secures Lori a summer babysitting job with a bus ticket to New York City as part of the payment.
Lori thrives in New York City, and Jeannette decides she will leave that summer and finish her senior year there. Dad tries to convince her to stay by showing her the blueprints to the Glass Castle, but she is determined to leave. Mournfully, Dad walks Jeannette to the bus station.
Analysis: Part III (High School), continued
Dinitia’s plight underscores how racism and segregation enforce artificial divides between people who otherwise have a lot in common. Dinitia doesn’t identify the father when she tells Jeannette she is pregnant, but she later goes to prison for stabbing her mother’s boyfriend to death. Jeannette does not explicitly draw any conclusions, but the narration implies that Dinitia was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. From this incident, we can see that Dinitia and Jeannette’s families have quite a few similarities, including unsafe home environments, parents who put themselves before their children, and sexual violence. These parallels reveal that extreme poverty, regardless of its root causes, can have the same tragic consequences regardless of race. Furthermore, the town’s strained race relations prevent the girls from becoming very close. Had they been able to confide in each other, they could have at the very least provided some solace in mutual understanding. In this way, racism isolates Dinitia and Jeannette, depriving them of an ally.
Lori Walls Quotes. ’Later that night, Dad stopped the car out in the middle of the desert, and we slept under the stars. We had no pillows, but Dad said that was part of his plan. He was teaching us to have good posture. The Indians didn’t use pillows, either, he explained, and look how straight they stood. Lori Walls, Self: The Glass Castle. October is packed with great movies and several new and returning TV series.
Dad’s use of Jeannette to distract Robbie marks another shift in their relationship because Dad no longer treats her as his child. Dad actively encourages Jeannette to flirt with Robbie, a marked contrast to his childhood lesson of pervert hunting. When Jeannette confronts Dad after her escape, he cites their trip to the Hot Pot, indicating that he intentionally subjected Jeannette to the threat of sexual violence with Robbie, convinced that she could protect herself. Dad’s explanation perverts the lesson that Jeannette internalized at the Hot Pot when she was a little girl. At the Hot Pot, Dad promises that he only put her in danger so that she would learn to swim, or grow and become independent. With Robbie, Dad threw her in the proverbial pool so that they could win eighty dollars. A clue to this change in attitude lies in the way Dad says that they’re a team. This word choice shows that Dad now views Jeannette as his teammate, his equal, not his daughter whom he has a duty to protect.
Mom and Dad punish Jeannette for calling out their parenting skills because she directly challenges their authority, shattering the family narrative. When Dad whips Jeannette with a belt, it’s the first time either parent has disciplined their kids, which shows us how deeply Jeannette’s words have cut him. Throughout Jeannette’s childhood and up until Welch, the Walls family has always described themselves as creative and brilliant, and implied the children were lucky to have such wonderful parents. While their hardships in Welch have by now thoroughly shattered this illusion, Jeannette is the first to explicitly say so by accusing Mom and Dad of not acting like parents. She has not just called out Mom and Dad but completely broken through their self-images. Dad’s response, to impose physical punishment, reveals that he believes acting like a parent involves holding the power over one’s children, controlling them instead of guiding and protecting them.
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Who is Brian Walls in The Glass Castle? What is his role in the story, and what happens to him in his later life?
Brian Walls in The Glass Castle is Jeannette’s younger brother, and the only boy in the family. Brian follows Lori and Jeannette to New York, and later has a family and becomes a police officer.
Read more about Brian Walls in The Glass Castle.
Brian Walls: The Glass Castle Shows Strong Sibling Bonds
When Rex met Rose Mary, he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The day he met her, he said they were going to get married. Rose Mary was coy at first, stating that twenty-three men had already tried to marry her, but Rex was persistent. He wore her down until she said yes, and they were married six months later.
Lori was conceived a few months after the wedding. A year later, their second child, Mary Charlene, was born but died nine months later from sudden infant death syndrome. Two years after Mary Charlene’s death, Jeannette was born. Rose Mary called her the replacement child. Panic buttons removed from capitol. Brian came along a year later. He was born in mid-seizure and couldn’t breathe. Rose Mary said he was likely a “goner,” but Brian lived, and the seizures stopped. Jeannette Walls and Brian Walls grew up together and often protected each other.
Collateral Damage
Food became an obsession for Jeannette, Lori, and Brian Walls in The Glass Castle. They were always plotting about how they could find something to eat. Jeannette started stealing small items of food from other kid’s lunches at school. When she played at a friend’s house, she’d slip into the kitchen and rummage for something to eat. She’d inhale the food in the bathroom, then go back out to play.
Jeannette and Rex had always had a special bond. They were close, and she thought he could do no wrong. Rex told Jeannette she was his favorite because she was the only one who had faith in him. So when Lori and Brian started to criticize their father’s behavior, she defended him and his inventions. Jeannette was angry that her siblings thought Rex was a worthless drunk, but she also noticed that Brian seemed put out by something more than Rex’s drinking. She noticed it first one day when they passed the Green Lantern.
The Green Lantern was a brothel run out of a large green house near the highway. The women hung around the porch in short dresses or swimsuits waving to each car that passed. Jeannette and Brian didn’t know what went on inside, but they liked to spy on the house from bushes. One day, Jeannette dared Brian to go talk to one of the women. She was seven, and he was six. Brian talked to the women for a long time, and when he came back, he said that men go inside, and women are nice to them. After that, Brian always waved to the women on the porch.
But on this particular day, Brian didn’t wave back when a woman called out to him. Jeannette questioned how the woman knew his name, and Brian told her the story.
For Brian’s birthday that year, Rex had taken him to the store to pick out a comic book. Afterward, Rex took him to the Nevada Hotel, the other casino in town. They ate dinner with a woman named Ginger, the same woman who waved from the porch. Following dinner, the three went to a suite in the hotel. Rex and Ginger disappeared into the bedroom, and Brian was left in the main room to read his book.
By the time Rex and Ginger came out, Brian had read and reread the comic at least twice. Ginger sat down and made a fuss over the comic, and Rex made him give it to her.
Jeannette Walls Sued By Mom
Jeannette knew the way Brian was acting wasn’t just about the comic book, but she didn’t know what else could have happened. She still didn’t know what happened at the Green Lantern, and Brian wouldn’t say anymore about it. Though Jeannette Walls and Brian Walls had a close relationship, she was unable to find out what happened.
Finding a New Beginning
Jeannette and Brian Walls in The Glass Castle had been corresponding through letters since she left. Although life was moving forward for her and Lori, things in Welch were getting increasingly worse.
Rex was always drunk except when he was thrown in jail for a night. Rose Mary was successful at living for herself and was more or less withdrawn from the family. Maureen was practically living at her friends’ homes. And Brian was sleeping underneath an inflatable raft because the roof in their bedroom had collapsed from water damage.
Jeannette and Lori wondered if Brian would like the city. He was comfortable in the outdoors and never seemed to have a problem with Welch. Also, unlike the girls, Brian had friends. But after Jeannette called and told him about the apartment and the ease of finding work, Brian was convinced. He took the same bus to New York City the day after his junior year of high school. He started working at an ice cream parlor close to The Phoenix offices, and at night, he’d wait for Jeannette to finish her work so they could go home together.
Brian Walls in The Glass Castle: Adult Life
Lori Walls From The Glass Castle
Five years after Rex’s death, the family gathered at Jeannette’s home for Thanksgiving. She was remarried and living in an old farmhouse Upstate. Her relationship with Rose Mary had dwindled over the years, and her mother had never met John, her new husband.
Jeannette and John picked Lori and Rose Mary up from the train station. Jeannette smiled at the ease with which John related to her family. He was also a writer and published a few books and magazine articles. He was warm and compassionate and had a teenage daughter from a previous marriage. Like Jeannette Walls, Brian Walls had found security in his new life.
Back at the house, Brian waited with his eight-year-old daughter, Veronica. He and his wife had also divorced, and he now lived in a house he renovated in Brooklyn. Brian Walls in The Glass Castle had moved up in the force to sergeant detective running a unit that investigated organized crime.
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- The author's unbelievable childhood as her absent parents went on alcoholic binges
- How Jeannette and her siblings escaped their parents to strike out on their own
- The complicated relationship Jeannette had with her parents before they died