The Bell Jar – Silvia Plath

[SPOILER ALERT]

“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.”

That quote describes this book just perfectly. The Bell Jar is a testament to loneliness; to the loneliness we feel when we don’t know who we are; to the loneliness we feel when we go insane.

The story is about a girl, Esther, who’s in the pinnacle of her life: she’s won several scholarships for college, she’s about to graduate and nothing in her life seems wrong. But here’s when her problem strikes. Her problem is that she doesn’t know who she is, or who she wants to be. Her boss wants her to be a successful editor. Her mother wants her to learn practical skills that are not as abstract as literature. Her boyfriend wants her to simply get married, have children and drop her professional carrier. And her... well she has no idea who she wants to be.

Plath makes a beautiful job describing how lonely this makes Esther feel, and how she fails to connect with anybody because of it. And eventually... well it turns to be too much for her, and she decides to kill herself. Esther seems so rational about this that it makes the reader wonder whether it really is the right choice. So, basically, she goes insane – insane enough that after her suicide attempt she ends up in an asylum.

And here’s Plath’s real gift shows up. It’s amazing to see how the voice of the narrator doesn’t change at all before and after Esther’s insanity, and yet everything she does, and everything everyone around her does changes dramatically. As a reader, you still feel connected to Esther, and you can still see her in her insanity; and yet, everything around her changes. The most amazing thing is that even though Esther is insane, and she has accepted this, she seems to be the only sane person in the story. Everyone does inexplicable things, that Esther doesn’t understand and that she doesn’t bother to ask about, and that ass a reader seem... well, crazy. All these things add up to leave Esther in an inexplicably lonely world, where nobody around her understands her, and everyone is insane.

So the book is good. It’s a really powerful read, and it becomes more powerful when you read Plath’s biography. It turns out The Bell Jar is her own life, with some elements of fiction thrown in to add to it. She went to college on a scholarship, she had a suicide attempt, and she was in an insane asylum for six months. I guess this book was her way to try and explain what she felt though those awful times, and I doubt she could have done a much better job. No wonder it's a classic.