Walls Day One Handout
HMXP 102
Dr. Fike
Remember to bring a copy of The Glass Castle to class with you.
1. Lecture on the epigraph: It is from Dylan Thomas’s
________________________________________________________________. His
main idea is a _____________________ with death versus a sense of a
_________________________________ (2 words). __________________ language
permeates the poem. “Blessings” are both ______________________ from God and
life’s ______________________. The key stanza, from which the epigraph is taken, says:
life is a journey on a _______________________________________________, but
heaven is our _____________________________. It also suggests that humans are like
blackberries: we grow and please __________ as blackberries ripen and please ______.
The implication of Thomas’s poem for Jeannette Walls’s experience is this: If heaven is
our ______________________________ (2 words), she has hope of seeing her father
again. In addition, The Glass Castle is a book about blessings (_____________) in a
world full of blessings (_______________, _______________). The difficulties she
records in her book are therefore not without __________________.
2. The Glass Castle’s structure:
a. Bookends:
i. Opening:
ii. Ending:
b. Aristotle: A story has three parts: beginning, middle, end. See over.
Part of Story
Location
Beginning
Middle
End
Wm. Blake’s
stages
Innocence
Experience
Organized Innocence
Comedy vs. tragic
potential
Attitude toward her
parents
c. Shooting/Stabbing
i. Page 89
ii. Pages 275-76
iii. Shadow work/individuation
iv. What Jesus says. Copy it here:
3. Exercise on the book’s concepts and discussion. Copy the list of concepts here or in your
notebook.