A response to The Bell Jar Essay

You would expect anybody to want the story of depression and self-destructive thoughts to leave your retentivity as soon as the last page was over. However, The Bell Jar is more about the pump of survival when you are trapped inside yourself and f adjustened because the rest of the world expects some topic completely different from you something you cannot employ them. Something you dont want to give them, if it were your choice. This is a highly auto-biographical account by Plath of a vernal girl finding that when she should be most excited about her life, she instead finds that things arent what she expected, and that the culture of the 1950s doesnt seem to allow for all that she wants, which begins her descent into depression.The Bell Jar is in the form of a Roman clef, with the main protagonist (Esther Greenwood) succumbing to mental illness. Esther begins the book thinking about the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, and thinking about cadavers, which is a motif tha t recurs later on in the book. Esther thinks being executed must be the worst thing in the world so we can tell already that she isnt exactly a light-hearted character. Instead, passim the novel, we discover that she is brutally honest and self deprecating. She wins a fashion writing contest, still she isnt overly happy about it, viewing the gifts and girls there superficial Girls interchangeable that make me sick. She appreciates that she is meant to be the envy of thousands of otherwise college girls but her future prospects trouble her she can either marry, or, become a secretary and then marry. uncomplete satisfies her. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, so women in the fifties are meant to want to marry and start a family, and Esther knows this too well. It isnt considered right to think otherwise, so these opinions stay inside her head. Perhaps, this is why mental illness festers within her she bottles up her emotions and they flux with more menacing thoughts. Buddy laughs at her when she refuses his marriage proposal, saying that shes crazy and shell change her mind. She thinks he is a hypocrite, and no longer sees him in admiration because of his double standards.Esther observes the gap between what society says she should vex at her age and what she does experience, and this gap intensifies her madness and makes her more aware of any problems she may have, because she is now up to(p) to see everything wrong with her in somebody elses eyes. Esther feels she must repress her natural gloom, cynicism, and dark liquid body substance and falsify opinions. Esthers aversion to convention and conforming is perhaps why she feels so alone and her darker thoughts collide with over its really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier.Esthers descent into depression and suicidal thoughts begins on the ski slopes, when she begins scared but aims straight down. This is only the first of numerous suicide attempts she wants to essay hanging, drowning, pill overdoses and cutting her wrists, but there are flaws in all of them. When Esther tries to kill herself, she finds that her body seems resolved to live. Esther believes that she could kill herself if she wanted, but she must remove the barrier of her body. The beating heart symbolizes her life, as her heart beats, I am I am I am. This is again enforced because she never assigns a blame to her depression, but rather lets us see what it feels like to be in it and living through an experience like it, as she wrote I am I am I am.But I think the full-length book can be summarized by something that Buddy said to her on the ski slopes You were doing fine, a long-familiar voice informed my ear, until that man stepped into your path.