77 pages • 2 hours read
Jeannette WallsThe Glass Castle
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 23-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Desert”
Chapter 23 Summary
Jeannette and her family’s new home is massive by any standard, containing 14 rooms. Mom converts the two front rooms into the R.M. Walls Art Studio. The kids attend a public school called Emerson where they are all in gifted classes. Dad joins the local electricians’ union and lands a job easily amid Phoenix’s booming economy.
Their new life isn’t one of total luxury, however. The house is infested with cockroaches and termites, and before long the living room floor looks like Swiss cheese. Dad does little to address the termite problem aside from hammering his empty beer cans into the holes in the floor.
Chapter 24 Summary
At night, Mom and Dad refuse to close the windows, insisting that the kids need fresh air. One night, a man climbs through the window and rubs his hands on Jeannette’s genitals while she sleeps. Brian chases the man off with a hatchet, but still Dad and Mom insist on keeping the windows open.
Despite her anti-authority bent, Mom thinks of herself as a devout Catholic. Most Sundays, she takes the kids to mass. The family finds little sense of community there, however, thanks to Dad’s frequent heckling of the priest.
Chapter 25 Summary
Life in the city is hard on Dad, who misses the wide-open spaces of the family’s previous homes. One day, he takes the whole family to the zoo. Outside the cheetah enclosure, Dad climbs over a fence and rests his hand on the animal’s neck through the bars. Jeannette follows him and asks to pet the cheetah, which proceeds to lick her hand. As a security guard escorts the family out of the zoo, Jeannette recalls, “I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought? None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah” (109).
Chapter 26 Summary
Not long after the cheetah incident, Dad loses his job. With Mom’s inheritance money gone, the family returns to a life of indigence. Jeannette and Brian survive on one meal a day at school, plus whatever they find in dumpsters. Meanwhile, Dad embarks on a righteous crusade to rid Phoenix of the mob, spending his days and nights doing “research” at bars supposedly run by the Mafia. Increasingly, he comes home in fits of drunken rage, breaking furniture and dishes.
The family approaches Christmas that year with great anticipation. They even buy a Christmas tree for one dollar after the man at the tree farm takes pity on them. On Christmas Eve, although Dad is so drunk he can barely stand, Mom insists he accompany the family to midnight mass. Dad interrupts the mass with a series of blasphemous outbursts, and the family is asked to leave.
Back home, Jeannette gives Dad an antique lighter as a present. He uses it to light the tree on fire. As Dad laughs uproariously, the rest of the family frantically extinguishes the fire with water and blankets, ruining the rest of the presents.
Chapter 27 Summary
When Dad asks Jeannette what she wants for her 10th birthday, Jeannette says she wants him to quit drinking. The next morning, Dad straps himself to his bed. For almost a week, Dad is in agony, groaning and sweating constantly and occasionally letting out hideous screams. Even after his delirium stops, Dad shakes uncontrollably for days. It takes him most of the summer to recuperate, but by the fall he recovers much of his strength.
To celebrate, Dad plans a family camping trip to the Grand Canyon, just like old times. On the way there, around 80 miles into their trip, Dad tries to see how fast the car will go. White steam shoots out of the hood, and the car clatters to a stop. Unable to fix the engine, the family abandons the car and hitchhikes back to Phoenix. When they reach home, Dad disappears.
Chapter 28 Summary
Dad returns three days later in a drunken fury. When he finds Mom hiding in the tub, she runs downstairs and grabs a butcher knife. After a physical confrontation, the two abruptly stop fighting and fall into each other’s embrace.
With Dad drinking again and with no income, Mom decides the family should move to West Virginia where Dad’s parents live. With some money Mom receives from an oil lease she inherited, she buys a 1956 Oldsmobile that barely makes it home from the car lot, lurching and stalling the entire time. Mom refuses to either sell or rent out the Phoenix house while they are away. While Dad initially vows to stay in Phoenix, he finally gets in the car moments before the family drives away.
Chapters 23-28 Analysis
The big house and cash inheritance Mom receives after her mother’s death would seem to position the Wallses for success—and for a while they do. Eventually, however, the family’s stay in Phoenix follows the same pattern as the stay in Battle Mountain. At first, life is an adventure, albeit one with troubling warning signs. Dad’s tendency to plug up termite holes with spent beer cans is a particularly literal representation of his attitude toward life’s problems. The scene at the zoo when Dad pets the cheetah and invites Jeannette to do the same is another moment of high adventure that nevertheless exists in that space between turbulence and order that is most dangerous for the Wallses. In fact, Dad’s act of crossing the fence and putting his hand through the cheetah cage in many ways mirrors his earlier speech about crossing the boundary between safety and chaos.
Dad also willfully crosses that boundary when he once again loses a series of jobs. This most recent slide back into indigence is made all the more tragic because of the potential of the family’s fresh start in Phoenix. Jeannette attributes Dad’s self-destruction in Phoenix to his inability to thrive in a city. Given that these exploits follow the precisely same pattern as the ones in Battle Mountain and everywhere else, however, this explanation is far from convincing.
As Dad’s alcoholism worsens even further, the nature of his codependent relationship with Mom is put into even sharper relief. For example, the author writes:
After Dad had collapsed, I would try to pick up the place, but Mom always made me stop. She’d been reading books on how to cope with an alcoholic, and they said that drunks didn’t remember their rampages, so if you cleaned up after them, they’d think nothing had happened. ‘Your father needs to see the mess he’s making of our lives,’ Mom said. But when Dad got up, he’d act as if all the wreckage didn’t exist, and no one discussed it with him (112).
Despite Mom’s effort, she has already exhibited a tolerance for living amid squalor and chaos. Therefore, Dad has little reason to bat an eye at the wreckage of his latest bender. While Mom is a victim in a toxic, verbally abusive relationship, her own tendencies toward chaos only serve to feed into and exacerbate Dad’s tendencies toward the same.
The family hits another nadir at Christmas—a holiday that, as in earlier chapters, reflects the Wallses’ family dynamics at a given moment. Perhaps out of desperation, the family anticipates having the best Christmas of their lives. It turns out to be the worst: Dad drunkenly heckles the priest at Midnight Mass, sets the Christmas tree on fire, and laughs uproariously while the family douses the flames, thereby ruining the presents. By this point, the family’s expectations of Dad are so low that nobody externalizes their anger in the wake of these acts. Jeannette writes, “When Dad went crazy, we all had our own ways of shutting down and closing off, and that was what we did that night” (115).
It may be tempting to view all of the Wallses’ problems through the lens of substance abuse, but this interpretation is complicated by the family’s aborted trip to the Grand Canyon. Having been sober for months, Dad seeks to take the family on a trip that recalls the more innocent adventuring of years past, but he once again sabotages his and his family’s happiness by seeing how fast the car will go, causing it to die 80 miles outside Phoenix. The gambit is not malicious, merely reckless, but it highlights the extent to which alcohol merely exacerbates Dad’s inherent need for chaos. The scene also reveals the manner in which Jeannette is perceived by rest of the family as being as much an enabler of Dad as Mom is, as she encourages him to drive “faster than the speed of light” (119). Lori criticizes her over this, but Jeannette is only ten years old at this point. More than anything, Jeannette remains a victim of that same innocence and optimism driving her belief that Dad will one day build the Glass Castle. It is the slow erosion of this innocence that makes up the dominant psychological narrative of the book.
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