“IT WAS A QUEER, SULTRY SUMMER, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” This is the first sentence of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. This autobiographical book follows the life of Esther Greenwood, she wins a junior editor on a magazine and goes to New York for a month and works for a woman named Jay Cee. She doesn’t know why she is in New York because she is not having the fun she should be. Her along with eleven other girls are living in a woman’s hotel. After a painful month in New York, her relationships get extremely complicated with her mother and her college boyfriend Buddy Willard. With her relationships slowly drives her into madness.
Sylvia Plath gets the reader’s attention by making the insanity of her character almost real and having it feel real for the reader. She keeps the reader’s attention by the suspense of the character going through things till the end. The beginning started a little slow, but when you get further into the book it gets better as you get to see more about Esther and what she sees, thinks and acts throughout the book. She begins to slowly draw the
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An example could be when Esther is at Doreen’s friends house while she is in New York. “Great white bear skins lay about underfoot, and the only furniture was a lot of low beds covered with Indian rugs.” She also gives her readers a great description of Esther, but she here in the beginning of the book she is describing her from a makeup kit that she got. “I still have the makeup kit they gave me, fitted out for a person with brown eyes and brown hair: an oblong of brown mascara with a tiny brush, and a round basin of blue eye-shadow just big enough to dab the tip of your finger in it, and three lipsticks ranging from red to pink, all cased in the same little gilt box with a mirror on one