Resilience By Empathy
While being faced when growing up with adverse conditions, humanity possesses endurance and the ability to accept and forgive those responsible. In Jeannette Walls ' The Glass Castle (2005), Walls shows the ability of a child to develop resilience in the face of difficulty, early independence, and eventually redemption for all the hurt caused. Jeannette prefers not to live a bitter life of grudges against her family, even though they are the ones responsible for the sorrows of her childhood. Jeannette describes her formative years so that both sides (her sisters and her parents) get a vivid picture of the reader. While she grows, Jeannette faces three major obstacles: obesity, parental neglect, and empty promises. Nevertheless, she was motivated by her determination to conquer these obstacles. Interestingly, it is the same hardship that has reinforced the desire to live in her and not to be like her family. A classic bildungsroman novel, the book covers the childhood of Jeannette into adulthood where Jeannette develops in a dysfunctional family and grasps the principles of resilience and redemption successfully. Resilience is a quality that generates power, resilience, and obduracy. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is more linked to softness, tenderness, and weakness. Mixing both hard and soft roles is important for a well-balanced life as she develops the skills needed to survive in a tough world and love and cherish a family that in her decisive years has not provided for her properly.
Jeannette notices her parents ' palpable absence at The Glass Castle and she still experiences a lack of love and care on the rare occasions they're there. The first case of parental neglect happens when she recovers from burns while baking at the tender age of three. The parents of Jeannette pick them up lifelessly, abandon them to their own immature devices, and leave them at a very early age to fend for themselves. Because Rex her dad hates hospitals, despite her getting all the care she needs, he checks her out of the hospital. Nevertheless, Jeannette pays loving, dutiful attention to past parental neglect. When Jeannette needs her, she chooses not to leave her friends. She stands by their side, at home, at the hospital bed, and at the funeral to forgive them for past hurts, expressing unconditional love. She fosters a brave spirit of reconciliation even when she does not neglect and look out for her tramp family. The parents of the Walls are putting their children at unnecessary risk. Jeannette confesses that 'with Dad's gun, a tall, black, six-shot revolver, I was pretty good when I was four' (Walls 2005). In reckless neglect, the parents have the family handgun exposed and within sight of the children. When they are squirted by a threatening neighbor with a water gun, the kids take the gun and fire it seriously.
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The children develop an enhanced sense of self-looking for danger and taking precautions to protect or defend themselves. If the parents of the Walls had been over-protective, coddling their children and holding them under their wings, they would not have been able to take care of themselves in adversity. Because of parental neglect, Jeannette and her parents have to lose a life. He recalls that 'one day, when Brian and I had come home to an empty refrigerator, we went out to the back of the house in search of bottles for redemption' (Walls 2005). There are two elements in this statement: poverty and proactive self-preservation. In the Walls household, cash has always been scarce. Her father, the breadwinner, who works as a miner, would fritter beer and women with his meager earnings. In the face of this traumatic alienation, the siblings demonstrate courage by finding their own food and treatment. The nighttime house arrangement (the time of most effective danger) gives a microcosmic image of the reality of the Walls boys. Jeannette attests that 'Mom and Dad closed the front door at night and the back door and unlocked all the doors' (Walls 2005). This transparent weakness reflects parental neglect where children are exposed to danger without any involvement by parents. The moment that Jeannette was almost attacked by a vagabond robbing inside Jeannette's home simply states that 'Dad was out that night and she was dead to the world while Mom was asleep.' (Walls 2005). The irresponsibility of the parents also endangers the kids, however durable as a hard leather, with ongoing hardship, the children of the Walls are stronger and motivated in the future to withstand more difficult circumstances.
The conclusion is a bittersweet one, the novel appears. Gathered for Thanksgiving at the family dinner, the Walls family is coming together to mourn after the death of Mr. Walls. It's funny that Jeannette's only Thanksgiving celebration is the one she planned on her own, which her family never took the time to do in her childhood. Walls crown the final chapter of the book, 'Thanksgiving' to show the peak of her resilience and forgiveness success and how it affects her empathy. She's going through a hard, tumultuous life – a life the average American kid doesn't have to go through: alcoholism, parental neglect, and broken promises. However, she has a lot of reasons to harbor recriminations, she chooses to forgive and move on.
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