The Bell Jar

I honestly had no idea what to expect of The Bell Jar. I knew who Sylvia Plath was and how she died, but I know of her as a poet and was actually unaware that she had published any novels. In all honesty, I thought The Bell Jar would be a collection of poetry. Instead, it is a novel that seems to be from the Holden Caulfield school of narrators who have disengaged from life after seeing the pointlessness of the whole thing.

Esther Greenwood is a young woman who has regularly achieved academic excellence and at the beginning of the novel is on a month long internship for a New York based magazine. In the first half of the novel, Esther relates her adventures in New York, some comic, some sad. She feels separate from other people, but not in a way that is particularly different than what most people go through from time to time. However, once she returns home to find that she did not get accepted into a writing program as she had anticipated, things take a terrible turn and she attempts suicide. The second half of the novel is a harrowing first person description of a nervous breakdown in action. While the novel ends on a hopeful note, the subsequent tragedy of Plath's life leaves the reader feeling that the hopefulness will be short lived.

After reading and researching, I now understand that The Bell Jar is largely autobiographical. Virtually everything and everyone in the story mirror real events and people in Plath's life. In fact, before she died, Plath insisted the novel not be published in the United States and was only published in the UK under a pseudonym. One feels slightly uncomfortable reading the novel knowing that it is a relatively true account, especially when one knows the rest of the story and the relief that the narrator has survived her ordeal is undercut by the knowledge of her ultimate fate.