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The Bell Jar Plath

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Unlike most coming-of-age stories, Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell jar,” has a surprisingly dark plot. Throughout the story we witness, the main character, Esther’s descent into madness. Esther has her entire life ahead of her, and every opportunity any women at this time could want. Unfortunately, she feels immensely overwhelmed and unfulfilled with these given circumstances. Not because she’s not satisfied with her life, but because she struggles to find an identity for herself. In the beginning of the story, Esther is spending a month in New York, taking part in an internship for a popular fashion magazine. She has dozens of scholarships for college, openings for the magazine she could easily fill, and her boyfriend at the time even …show more content…

Everywhere she goes, suicide is on her mind. A few times, Esther actually attempted to kill herself, to no avail of course. She becomes desperate and says, “...I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and time again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left…” (130). Esther feels, not only isolated from society and the real world, but detached from her own physical being as well. Later, Esther is taken to a mental institution to be treated for er suicidal tendencies, and depression. The expenses are paid for by a popular novel writer. On the drive to the ward, Esther ponders over the validity of her own feelings. “If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat-on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok-I would be sitting under the same glass jar, stewing in my own sour air.” (152). Esther feels utterly separated from everything around her, and nothing is enough to jostle her out of the rut of depression she’s stuck in. Earlier in the book, she had compared this isolation to a train ride. “It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction-every second the city gets smaller and smaller,

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