The Glass Castle: Part 4 Summary & Analysis

Though Jeannette has purposefully refused all of Dad’s oblique offers to stay, she still relies on his support to survive in a new, scary place.

Jeanette’s self-sufficiency immediately makes her stand out. The “lessons” her parents have taught her are immediately established as beneficial.

Just like as a child in the desert and in Welch, Lori finds a way to use her intelligence to maximize her success.

Compare these first interactions with Jeanette’s dismal impression of Welch. This feels like a place that could become a home. Note also Jeanette’s willingness to ask for directions, something Dad likely wouldn’t want to do.

Given Mom and Dad’s suspicion of big cities, this is the first time Jeannette finds herself under a starless sky—perhaps even without her beloved Venus to orient her.

The job is pays twice as much as Jeannette’s gig selling jewelry, and the novel location makes it seem even more new and exciting.

Jeannette continues to compare her current home to Welch, and materially, the new home wins on every front.

For Jeannette, The Phoenix is one step further along the path she’s set for herself beginning with The Maroon Wave, to become a journalist who knows what’s “really going on.”

Again note how her awful childhood experiences actually have hardened Jeanette and prepared her to succeed. After the Little Hobart Street rat, a mouse wouldn’t faze her at all.

The mention of the watch recalls Jeannette’s desire to be someone who needs to be places. And from $40 to $80 to $125 a week, she certainly is moving up in the world.

As Jeannette is fulfilling her own dreams step by step, the family seems either to have stagnated or regressed. The Walls children continue to stick together, and Brian too realizes that he needs to escape his parents to make a life.

Like Jeannette, Brian has skipped prom and Senior Day for a new adventure.

This moment encapsulates the tension between the positives and negatives of self-sufficiency. Jeanette can figure things out on her own, and this gives her strength and independence. But it also can be much harder, and take longer, to figure out everything for yourself. Armstrong can see Jeanette’s potential, and he was the wisdom to help Jeanette see that pure self-sufficiency will never allow her to achieve it.

It’s stunning how quickly Jeannette has moved from a shack in West Virginia to an Ivy League university, thanks both to her own pluck and to the help and support of others, even if not her parents.

Though she may have materially arrived, Jeannette’s process of growing up doesn’t end here.

The Walls children remake their home without their parents. Dad remains delusional, not seeing that he and Mom are the barriers to their children having an acceptable life. His kids all leaving him shames him, while Lori grows into being the parental figure of the family.

At once, the tumultuous years spent in Welch are no longer a daily battle but rather a comical memory, safer because it’s now firmly in the past.

Though the last scene had located the siblings’ past life firmly in another time, this event makes clear to Jeannette that she can escape Welch but not her parents nor their crazy “adventures.”

Here Jeannette suggests another way of thinking about home: as something that belongs to her, without being shared with others.

Though they had shown it in different ways, it was always clear that Mom and Dad were upset that their kids had left—not seeing, or perhaps refusing to admit, that the kids were leaving them.

Mom and Dad’s start in New York seems to repeat Jeannette’s childhood in fast-forward, with even an echo of Uncle Stanley’s setting their house on fire.

Mom’s curious relationship to objects becomes more acute and her tendency to hoard more evident in the confined space of New York, and in the home Lori has created for herself.

Dad’s engineering acumen combined with his consistently creative tactics manages to outsmart Brian. The mention of rules, however, is enough to scare Dad away—the kids’ entire childhood has been defined by the absence of rules. Now they embrace them.

From a flophouse to the street, Mom and Dad seem to have descended rapidly into homelessness. Even though none of their choices are new or unexpected, urban poverty seems to be a different animal.

Mom’s language and tone of adventure is, incredibly, still earnest rather than ironic. Admittedly, she embraces the new life with the same kind of intellectual curiosity with which she taught the kids outside of school when they were young.

Another example of Mom and Dad’s broad definition of education, challenging themselves even while refusing to conform.

The conflicting messages of responsibility that Mom and Dad have given to Jeannette come to a head with this internal conflict.

Though she’s technically now an adult, Jeannette has still not figured out who she really is, or at least how to reconcile the different ways she defines herself.

This devastating episode for Jeannette could have been more easily resolved had she dared to explain how her own family history led to her thoughts on the matter. Still unsure who she is and where she belongs, however, Jeannette proves unable to do so. She remains ashamed of her past, unwilling to accept it as part of her.

We’ve seen Mom’s cheery attitude descend into bitterness and despair before, but now things are different: they lack a true, stable home (however transient), and Lori and her siblings are no longer tied to their parents’ fate.

Jeannette’s inability to reconcile her past and present leads her to consider taking radical measures. Yet it is the idea of not pleasing Dad that helps to keep her going.

As usual, Jeannette seeks practical, concrete, and orderly solutions to problems, whereas Mom tends to assume these problems don’t exist.

Jeannette mentions the fact of Dad’s hospitalization nonchalantly, as small crises have become routine for Mom and Dad. Dad’s shifting thoughts regarding God imply that people can change, and certain ideas are not necessarily permanent.

This is the longest he’s been sober since he tried to give up drinking for Jeannette, and Dad finally shows some self-awareness about his addiction and the consequences of his drinking.

Mom’s constant cajoling may stem from her conviction that Dad needs to be responsible for her and her needs, but she seems unable to see that her needs may not match his needs; that placing her needs first could be dangerous for him. And they are. It is never more apparent than here that at this point Mom and Dad enable each other, that they help to accentuate each other’s most problematic qualities.

Jeannette catches the reader up on the siblings’ now separate lives, no longer centered around the family’s “adventures.” Mom and Dad’s differing reactions to receiving nice Christmas presents underline their different attitudes towards being “self-sufficient” but unable to provide for anyone else.

From chaos theory to general mechanics, Dad is capable of and interested in intellectual discovery, which recalls for Jeannette the pedestal on which she’d placed him as a child. Dad, in his own non-standard way, still wants to provide for his daughter. Unlike her father, Jeanette is not too devoted to self-sufficiency to refuse.

Mom has used the language of pioneers before—here it sounds more enthralling and less dismal than urban squatters. Once again her optimism seems ridiculous, and yet she seems to believe it.

Jeannette’s first impression reveals how she judges the space of a home herself, but her subsequent reflection acknowledges Dad’s handiness and the apartment’s aptness for them both.

Jeannette continues to toggle between her visceral reaction of disgust and her emotional attempt to understand Mom and Dad’s embrace of this apartment, and their definition of home—which may, Jeannette is learning, be far different from hers.

Jeanette remains ashamed of and unwilling to reveal her past or her parents to the people in her new life.

Jeannette’s description of Eric already depicts him as exactly the opposite of Dad—organized rather than scattered, responsible rather than negligent, and calm rather than edgy and impulsive. Just as Dad ran away from Welch to find an alternative in Mom, Jeannette seeks to find the opposite of Dad in Eric.

Jeannette here shows a growing maturity regarding the unstable and diverse definitions of a home.

Similar to the Christmas presents anecdote—Mom doesn’t think twice about admiring material possessions, whereas Dad sees in them what he could not provide.

For Jeannette, “help” must be material and concrete. Mom turns the offer on its head by challenging Jeannette’s very materialism.

Jeannette has consistently pursued a career path from her days in high school, even trying to fit a new job offer into her goal of knowing what’s going on.

Suddenly, Jeannette has access to a part of New York cultural life that her parents, despite their free events, could not dream of. Her initial adoration of this world seems idealized but also understandable.

In this new, vast, exciting world to which Jeannette has only had a brief introduction, family roots like hers are simply inconceivable. And she remains unwilling to threaten her new situation by revealing her past.

Mom’s desire to buy the land for “sentimental reasons” is consistent with her attitude towards material wealth in general, valuable to her as an object of appreciation rather than deriving any advantage from it.

Here it becomes clear that Jeanette’s entire awful experience in Welch—the abject poverty, hunger, rats, all of it—could have been turned on its head if Mom had just sold that land. The family could have been comfortable,. Her initial reaction to this is shock and horror: how could her mother have not sold that land to help her family? But she has also grown up enough to struggle to understand the difference between her own worldview and her mother’s. And even as the reader was horrified by Jeanette’s life in Welch, now faced with the prospect that Jeanette could have avoided such a life, the reader must ask whether the things Jeanette learned from that life weren’t valuable lessons after all.

This exchange again highlights Jeanette and her mother’s different values: to Jeanette a million dollars is valuable; to Mom it’s just paper that gets you things worth sentimental value.

Lori, Brian, and Jeannette often needed to band together as children to create a stable life for themselves; Maureen, who being younger was never entirely part of their group, has sought order and home outside the family.

When Jeannette was growing up, Mom and Dad’s conspiracy theories seemed questionable but ultimately harmless, whereas Maureen’s now seems to warrant more serious attention than Mom’s non-standard and optimistic medical advice.

The stabbing puts an end to any ambiguity on whether Maureen is struggling in the same way as Mom and Dad, or if she has more serious mental issues.

How do we account for people’s actions, especially violent ones? The Walls family’s various explanations arise from different ways to understand responsibility.

As a child, Maureen had often asked her siblings to tell her about California, which she was too young to remember. While Jeannette sought a home through a career, for Maureen it may be more a sense of place that will define home.

As Jeannette grew up she was increasingly frustrated with her parents for their inability to take care of and responsibility for her. But did she fail to do the same for her sister?

Jeannette’s realization about Maureen has only deepened the borders between her life and her parents’. Their physical changes, like Dad’s beard, mark this passing of time.

Recall Dad’s improbable if not fantastic stories about demons and piloting. Through stories Dad imposes another, more appealing narrative on his life. It is completely clear now that Dad’s stories were a way not just of entertaining his children but of hiding the truth from himself, of ducking the responsibility and therefore shame of what he had put his family through.

It takes Dad’s approaching death for Jeannette to realize how disorder and turbulence have not been uniformly negative in her life; at least, she wouldn’t be who she is without them.

Dad knows the answer is yes—he now accepts that truth—and in accepting it the shame of failing in that responsibility seems a good deal less.

Flashback to one of the early scenes, when Dad gathers Jeannette into his arms and they “escape” from the hospital together, towards another adventure. Despite everything, Jeanette still loves him and wants to give him that feeling of safety and excitement that he gave to her, to bring him to that border between order and turbulence.

Her inability to stay in any one place suggests that Jeannette does not see herself as belonging in any of them—a problem that surface-level solutions like skating won’t resolve.

This decision seems to be tied to Jeannette’s desire to seek a true home, a realization she’s had with Dad’s death. In Eric, she had run to the opposite of what her parents were, and had run to a ready-made home of wealth and comfort. But she hadn’t found, hadn’t built, a home that fit her.

Dad’s Christmas gift to her allows her to remember Dad but also to orient herself emotionally in a changing environment.