The Glass Castle – Quotation and Symbol Analysis

DIRECTIONS: Using the provided quote from the text, answer the following questions. 

– What is happening in this part of the text?

– Why is this quotation significant?

– How does the author let you know this part is significant (consider word choice, tone)?

– What does the Glass Castle symbolize here?

“When Dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert…He carried around the blueprints for the Glass Castle wherever we went, and sometimes he’d pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms.” (25)

Your answer

“I hated Billy at that moment, I really did. I thought of telling him about binary numbers and the Glass Castle and Venus and all the things that made my dad special and completely different from his dad, but I knew Billy wouldn’t understand.” (83)

Your answer

“The important thing…was that it came with plenty of land to build our new house. He planned to get to work right away. He intended to follow the blueprints for the Glass Castle, but he had to do some serious reconfiguring and increase the size of the solar cells to take into account that since we were on the north face of the mountain, and enclosed by hills on both sides, we’d hardly get any sun.” (151-152)

Your answer

“Dad had shown us the spot near the house where we were going to put the foundation and basement for the Glass Castle. He’d measured it off and marked it with stakes and string. Since Dad was hardly ever home…and never got around to breaking ground, Brian and I decided to help…” (155)

Your answer

“…Since we couldn’t afford to pay the town’s trash-collection fee, our garbage was really piling up. One day Dad told us to dump it in the hole. ‘But that’s for the Glass Castle,’ I said. ‘It’s a temporary measure,’ Dad told me. He explained that he was going to hire a truck to cart the garbage to the dump all at once. But he never got around to that, either, and as Brian and I watched, the hold for the Glass Castle’s foundation slowly filled with garbage.” (155)

Your answer