Symbol And Idea Of Esther In 'The Bell Jar'

Terra Dempsey

AP Literature

November 27th, 2014

Coghill

The Bell Jar Questions

1. “Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo” Here within chapter 1, Esther is describing where how she experiences the world as opposed to how others see her life. As far as anyone else is concerned, she has no reason to feel sad or melancholy. She had earned that month in New York entirely through

“Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” It is this quotation in chapter 15 that the symbol and idea of the bell jar is introduced. In this description Esther is showing how she is constantly trapped within the hell of her thoughts. She further goes on to say that nothing can help her escape this feeling, no matter the accomplishment. It is the bell jar constantly hanging over her mind that is keeping her from the important ones in her life. The comparison that Esther makes gives one the feeling of no escape, and as though she is part of some sick experiment from a scientist. It is this sense of suffocation that she feels that eventually begins to urge her suicidal

The treatments that Esther underwent from both facilities were very different, and certainly contrasted one another. Dr. Nolan had been kind and trusting toward Esther while Dr. Gordon had not been. Dr. Nolan had been kind and even seemed pleased when she had told him that she hated her own mother. Esther would occasionally become aware of when she would be acting selfishly or like a child. She had no problem imagining throwing herself from a moving car and leaping off a bridge despite recognizing that she should have been thankful.

8. Her instability had been slowly building throughout the novel, but it had been Dr. Gordon’s shock treatment that had jarred her mind to the point of wishing for death. She only ends up cutting deeply into her leg when her intention had been to slit her wrists. Her ideas of killing herself had “formed in [her] mind coolly as a tree or a flower.” She had realized that such decisions of life and death were not so much relinquishing control as they were of expressing control, what with a decision such as suicide being so