Voice is undoubtedly the pulse in The Glass Castle. And Walls creates a true coming of age novel, essentially, one detailing her transformed view of the world from growing up and her evolving voice. Unreliability is present, but not necessarily because the narrator is lying or withholding the truth. I would not even say that this evolving voice indicates that the narration that is lower on the ladder, in the child’s perspective, is one that is necessarily dramatic or full of exaggerations. More so, it is that the writer was able to be the kind of narrator that reveal the limited experience of the character (young Jennette). Point blank and simple: her unreliability and lack of credibility that many of us wrote about and spoke about for last class is largely rooted in her evolving voice.

Over the course of this memoir, Walls matures and climbs the ladder. She doesn’t climb up too far and tell us much in highlight. We are largely right there beside her, pushing through the turbulence and order, getting too close and too far to those intense moments. We should be blown away by the fact that Walls’ voice maintained consistent and that Walls did a phenomenal job by revealing these transformations similarly to the ways in which we received revelations and transform in our actual lives. 

I found that evolving voice in The Glass Castle were captured in the syntactical shifts between short syntax and longer more complicated sentence structures. Although I would argue that this short and sweet structure is prevalent in the first part of the memoir, I found it here and there within the second part as well. It seemed like those moments where she was being moved and impacted by her father, that those sentences became short again. What a way to indicate to the reader that this man, her father, makes her feel like a child again and makes her flushed or short in speech. Specifically when she is in the hospital because he is dying. When she speaks to wanting to break him out Rex-Walls-style and details a lot of her stirred feelings around this without, she speaks very simply. The moment is captured, all moments she has spent with this man are captured. Of course, not only is she able to remind us of her writing when she lower on the ladder, but also strip fluff from the scene to capture a very pivotal scene.

This more sophisticated narration doesn’t necessarily mean the narrator is up the ladder, aforementioned. But for the most part, this narration style will reflect the adult/ghost narrator. On page 288, the narrator was at the top of the ladder, using sophisticated language and sentence structuring to root a present experience of toasting with her mother with a memory of the past (Brian almost burning down the damn house). This shows that build up that Walls does, the revealing and coming of an older wiser person, is effective. She ends the memoir with the ability to show the impact of what she has learned and internalized. These sentence structures are an important technique in this coming of age story.