My response to reading the beginning part of “The Grass Castle” written by Jeannette Walls

 

    What came to my mind when I read the first chapter of this story is the warped relationship between the protagonist and her mother. In contrast to the protagonist who looks like a very rich person who has a lot of money, her mother seems to be poor as she “hoisted out of the Dumpster”. After continuing reading, it becomes clear that this parent and child have no way to keep in touch with each other.

    This difference in living standards and the cold relationship between parent and child made me have an idea. I assumed that the protagonist has been turned into a cold-hearted capitalist by some event and that this emphasizes the mother's misery. In other words, my initial impression was that I could understand the protagonist's shame over his mother's behavior, but I felt sorry for her.

    However, these first assumptions of mine were shattered by the next chapter of the story, The existence of the incident when the protagonist was three years old shocked me. It represented the mother's maternal defects and hinted at the existence of the protagonist's emotional trauma. The mother seemed attractive in her personality as a person who pursued her happiness rather than money and other material things, but in the sense that she valued her own life's fulfillment more than that of her children, she was a neglectful mother.

    After reading up to the beginning of the second chapter and learning about the nature of the protagonist's childhood experiences, the idea that the protagonist must have been traumatized by his mother came to mind. The protagonist's financial wealth reminded me of her professional endeavors, which in turn made me imagine the poverty in her mind and the emotional damage she had suffered.