The Glass Castle

“Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue; it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright” Benjamin Franklin

This quote is true as far as the empty bag part. If one has no more spirit and encouragement to go on, then they’ll probably never get anywhere and never stand out to anyone. They’ll just be sad and depressed because they’re so poor and they can’t get anywhere without the spirit to fight on. But poverty doesn’t always “deprive a man of all spirit and virtue”.
The poverty the family experiences in The Glass Castle can be very demoralizing. They’re constantly moving and in the beginning, they never had a place they stayed at long enough to call a home until a certain point in their lives. “We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn’t remember the names of some of the towns or what the houses we had lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of cars” (29).
Through all of this running around a fighting for life, the family had spirit. They still lived by morals and would always be there for each other. Even in the most dangerous of situations where there is fear, the family will still laugh together because they have each other and to them, anything can be accomplished. When Billy Deel was shooting everyone and Jeannette shot at him with a gun, they could still laugh in such a dangerous time. “We all started laughing, but it only seemed funny for a second or two, and then we stood there looking at one another in silence” (88).
Thanks to the father, in part, he was able to make the constant moving in the early part of the book that he called the “skedaddle” seem like an adventure. Instead of running away from bills, he’d make up some crazy story that made life exciting for them. “Dad called them henchmen, bloodsuckers, and the Gestapo. Sometimes he would make mysterious references to executives from Standard Oil who were trying to steal the Texas land that Mom’s family owned, and FBI agents who were after Dad for some dark episode that he never told us about because he didn’t want to put us in danger, too” (19).
Since the kids were young, these stories created the image of a fantasy, which kept their moral up and their spirit high even in times of extreme poverty.