"I wondered if [Dad] was remembering how he, too, had left Welch full of vinegar at age seventeen and just as convinced as I was now that he’d never return. I wondered if he was hoping that his favorite girl would come back, or if he was hoping that, unlike him, she would make it out for good."(Walls 241)
As Jeannette is faced with several harsh realities, which she has been completely oblivious to previously throughout her childhood, she truly finds herself both as an individual and as a writer during this period of her life. After her first few harsh experiences in Welch, she begins to write with a less naïve view of her own life and develops a more realistic idea of what she should expect from other people. Almost her entire life she wrote extremely optimistically and always tried to find the best in life no matter what the situation, but when she moves to Welch, she realizes how little she has and how unfortunate her life has been this whole time.
|
As Walls develops throughout the novel, she loses the innocence she had maintained during the entire first part of The Glass Castle. She begins to distance herself from her parents' ideas about life and develop a mind of her own, a different and more ambitious view than her parents'. This truly affects the style of her writing as she now contains an unique kind of happiness and hope when writing that she had lost due to her rough experiences in Welch.