Compare
and Contrast Where Did You Sleep Last Night and The Glass Castle by Jeannette
Walls
ENG-276G
Two memoirs Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Danzy Senna and The Glass
Castle by Jeannette Walls share the same similarities in their life stories:
a bad childhood within an alcoholic father. However, these two writers
are separated from each other about their feeling toward their family: Senna
has child anger to her broken family while Walls has forgiven her careless
parents. This anger leads Senna to write this book that she explored her
father’s past within her self-discovery. However, Walls writes about her past
by telling about her memories of childhood without seeking self-exploration;
instead she shows how forgiveness played an important role in her relationship
with her parents.
Senna’s was a daughter of bi-racial couple who has very different backgrounds.
Her parents divorced when she was a young child. Her troubled past drives her
to investigate both sides of her family, particularly her paternal line. She
says, “I thought of what was not there, the other half of me, my father’s side,
which I knew nothing about” (13). Her father’s background is multiracial and
filled with oral stories with unanswered questions. Because of this, she was
challenged to discover her father’s origins and to see what they were all about
so she would be able to discover her own identity within his lineage. In fact,
it was a self-discovery for her with convoluted past that was filled with pain
and gaping holes that illuminates her own childhood. Through this process she
aims to understand her difficult father, failure marriage of their parents and
the reason of her anger toward them. She was trying to find an answer to her
questions: can I forgive him for his neglect or for his promises he never kept.
Senna’s life was miserable at home until her parents divorced. She found this
fault in her father’s alcoholism and carelessness. He broke a family and gave
bitter childhood memories to his children because of his alcoholism. She and
her sibling were always neglected and did not have their father with them when
they need him most. So, these experiences affect her personal relationship
between her and her father. Thus, she always recalls her childhood with the
components of anger, broken promises and disappointed parents where she says,
“I worried I was damage beyond repair, that something had gone so wrong in my
childhood it could never be made right” (109).
In the progress of the book we see that Senna’s childhood anger which
surfaces again and again toward her father never ended because of their
difficult and unsatisfactory relationship. This disappointing experiences and
memories of her childhood encourage her to find more about her father’s past
where she was hoping to find the reasons of her anger toward her father. She
explores that the feeling that she had in her childhood is not different from
her father‘s where she says, “He’d spent a portion of his childhood in an
orphanage, but I sensed that to ally myself with him would be to orphan myself”
(182). She did not want to accept this situation that a father could give the same
pain to his children that he had in his childhood. Senna says, of an encounter
with her father, “Yet I felt it, the old snapping anger in by brain, the rage
that can go into remission but is never really gone. I still wanted him to pay
me back for the childhood that was long since over” (187).
Through her physical journey to her father’s past Senna finally began to
know her father but every each time her hope about forgetting her anger toward
him did not change. She says about her father, "Every descriptive
statement you can make about my father can be contradicted by the sentence that
follows. He is half of everything and certain of nothing" (124). Why did I
need to understand the reason for his behavior? The fact of his behavior was
enough. After the age of thirty nobody gets the excuse of a bad childhood
anymore. The statute of limitations has passed” (69). Through her
searching of past she tried to heal the old wounds of her childhood but she could
not.
In contrast To Senna, The Glass Castle has an opposite theme:
forgiveness. Walls tells about her unique childhood and gives a view of her
life as a child within the memories of her parents and siblings. She had an
unbearable childhood through her parents’ attitude to their children; however,
every each time she proves that she has no bad feelings toward them. She never
points the finger of blame at her parents because she accepted them as they are
so whatever they did Jeanette turned their action into love.
Jeanette’s parents had atypical views on life which can be seen in the
way they raised their children. The children were usually neglected and left to
fend for themselves. Her father, Rex, was alcoholic which made him abusive. He
was so intelligence but at the same time dysfunctional who never kept a steady
job and did not really care about to support his family. Moreover, he was
stealing his children’s money or taking the grocery money for his drink while
he was leaving them with no food. However, she was still made a
positive connection with it where she says, “In my mind, Dad was perfect,
although he did have what Mom called a bit of a drinking situation” (23). Walls
did not invite her father in her graduation ceremony, but later she felt regret
and apologized to him. She always loved and never gave up him because he always
became an inspiration to her. She always felt special within their relationship
and described the experiences in positive terms. Walls says about her father,
“But despite all the hell-raising and destruction and chaos he had created in
our lives, I could not imagine what my life would be like—what the world would
be like—without him in it. As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me
in a way no one else had” (279).
Her mother was not different than her father. Although the all family was
suffering from hunger she still did not want to work like him. She was a
selfish person who was spending all her time on her own needs. What she was
caring about all the time was her art. She even sometimes was seeing her
children as a barrier on her progression in this field. However, Walls accepted
her mother in this way and forgives her quickly even she suffers from her
attitude and carelessness through his life of childhood.
Walls and her siblings hardly survived in this neglected life of them but
still they forgive their parents. She burned herself at the age of three while
she was cooking herself hot dog. Her brother Brian had an injury on his head
but they did not do any medical care. They never had a stable house, warm
clothes, or something to eat for many days. She remembers how she was having
her lunch in the school: “When other girls came in and threw their lunch
bags in the garbage pails, I’d go retrieve them” (173). She had a rough
childhood which was filled with pain, hopeless dreams and disregarded needs but
still she was filled with love and remains as optimistic as possible.
It was a chosen of life for these children by their parents. Along with
this chosen life that was different from their friends’ life, this life was
painful and hard to accept. One time when her father asked her “Have I ever let
you down?”(210), she was going to tell her father truth first time but instead
she says” I’d heard that question at least two hundred times, and I’d always
answered it the way I knew he wanted me to, because I thought it was my faith
in Dad that had kept him going all those years”(210). So, every time she
accepts and conveys almost all of her bitter experiences through forgiving
eyes.
Walls dealt with her past and prepared a much better life for herself
despite her difficult experiences. She told reader about how her parents were,
how they survived in those situations. She did not engage in self-discovery in
her book. Instead she shows that people make mistakes in their life in
different situation but it is really important to forgive them and have
unconditional love, as she did in her whole life. This forgiveness was the main
thing for her that she kept faith in her father until his death.
Senna Danzy and Jeannette Walls did not have a happy childhood and had
alcoholic fathers who left these authors with many bitter memories. However,
their memories have many differences in the way of their feeling about these
experiences. Senna has child anger where she never forgets and tries to
find the reasons of it within her father’s background. By searching it she
explored herself in his past and every each time her anger surface again
instead of forgetting her painful past. However, what we see in Walls’s book is
different than hers. She shared her hard to believe-stories about her childhood
but every time she show how she have love and forgiveness toward her parents.
She tells these stories in an optimistic way that we see she does not have any
anger to her parents as she accepted them as they are.
Work Cited:
Danzy, Senna. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? New York: Picador,2010
Walls, Jeanette. The Glass Castle New York: Scribner, 2005
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