In Jeannette Walls' memoir The Glass Castle, a father, Rex Walls, prevents his family from accumulating considerable wealth. Rex buys alcoholic drinks whenever the family starts earning money. When he returns home he unleashes his anger on his family by destroying the few things he owns. Yet, while sober, he helps his family very much and loves them very much. Rex's good qualities and leadership make his place in the family indestructible, but they cannot overcome his personality problems. The Glass Castle thus depicts an immovable father who unjustly imprisons his family through irresponsible drinking. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Rex Walls' inability to lead his own life and take responsibility causes him to fail to meet the needs of his family. Being a poor man, Rex often lacks the financial ability to drink hard alcohol due to his lack of funds. The lack of drunkenness causes Rex to perform productive tasks that ultimately bring him money. In this state of greater wealth, Rex chooses to squander his earnings on alcohol due to a deeper problem in his life. In his youth, Rex's mother molested him. This trauma has marked his entire life and forces him to try to hide this problem and act as if it never happened, rather than face the problem head on. For this reason, despite numerous attempts, he never completely stops drinking. Because of his choice not to face his problems as a young man, Rex lives in a cycle of poverty and wealth synchronized with sobriety and drunkenness. Rex's drunkenness also drags his family with it, forcing the entire family to become poor again every time they earn enough money for Rex to go to the bar. Rex fails to fulfill the role of a father by irresponsibly controlling the family's wealth and property, thus leading to faulty family leadership. Rex's deep, unresolved problems force him into drunkenness and leave him unable to fulfill his role as a father. Due to Rex's drunkenness, his wife remains stuck in a cycle of depression and ignorant optimism. He sees Rex's elaborate stories justifying his use of money to research and build new inventions as simply another way to earn drinking money. He knows the poverty in which he lives and sometimes works to provide for his family. He detects Rex's external drinking problem and reads books to try to help stop this problem. This hopeful attempt to permanently change Rex never succeeds, and after enough attempts his hope for change is dashed. He sees that there will never be any positive or upward movement and that he will forever live in horrible conditions for the rest of his life. Subsequently, she spends some mornings in bed instead of teaching school, and eventually quits her job to spend time alone painting while her children gather food to survive. To try to solve her depression problem, Rose Mary (Rex's wife) adopts a highly optimistic lifestyle. He tries to always look on the bright side and forget his despair rather than face it. Rose Mary decides not to acknowledge the horrible house she lives in and instead naively believes she is living a wonderful life, not a life of deprivation and abuse. Rex's addiction to alcohol pushes Rose Mary into a desperation terrible enough that she finds comfort in creating a false reality in her mind, a way to make things seem better than.