Blog #3: Glass Castle – Narrator as character

Jeannette Walls does a good job of creating a character out of her younger self and creating using the narrator to express that character.

I want to start out with the very first chapter where she is an adult, current self. To me, this is an example where she does not concentrate so much on creating a character through the narrator. Instead, this chapter seems intended more as a set up for the story to come and to create the mother as a character. The first chapter also describes and contrasts her own life to that of her mother, which does build a sense of character for them both.

Tow of the chapters where I feel Walls does an excellent job of creating herself as a child-character through the narrator is the U Haul chapter and the demon hunting chapter.

In the U Haul chapter, the narrator is wholly within the child's brain and experience. She starts out by showing the reader that she believes her parents that being locked in the back of a dark and dusty U-Haul for fourteen or more hours will be “an adventure.” He narrative of the trip – being thrown around in the back of the truck, being unable to communicate that she has to pee, freaking out when the door swings open and Brian almost gets thrown out – is convincingly told from within the mind and at the level of understanding of the child Jeannette. The fact that the child narrator simply accepts the father's blaming the children for the door opening and warning them that they, not he, would have been thrown in jail, is a blatant example of the child's inability to see beyond the facts as presented by the father.

Similarly, the narrator is the completely identified as the child in the demon hunting chapter. She fully believes what her big sister says, that the thing she thinks is under the bed is a figment of her overactive imagination. But just to be sure, she checks it out with her father. She fully believes what her father says, though to the reader the explanation is patently ridiculous. (Or am I being anti-demonist, dissing an adult who might actually believe him, too?) The child narrator then goes on a hunting expedition with the father to catch the demon and accepts the father's strategy that she must simply show the demon that she is not afraid (maybe good advice to a kid…?)