The Bell Jar

The novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is about a girl named Esther who is severely depressed. She tries a lot of things to make her feel better, but nothing seems to work. After coming home from a prestigious fashion program in New York, she finds her home life to be dull and boring. She has nothing to do, and nothing that she wants to do. While her mother is away at work, she stays in bed all day. Esther goes to a doctor who is also a family friend to talk about how she is feeling. The doctor decides that she is not the best fit for Esther, she needs a new doctor. So she recommends her to another doctor, Doctor Gordon. Doctor Gordon choses a more aggressive plan for treatment, electric shock therapy. The electric shock therapy is not as helpful as they had hoped but Esther acts like it works so she can get out of it and not do it again.

Sylvia Plath has a very interesting writing style, it could be described as controversial. She is never holds back in her writing, she talks about topics that aren't particularly comfortable to talk about. Everything she talks about are generally uncomfortable topics. She talks about suicide in some parts of the novel, "I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one" (169). Esther is so depressed, which is a controversial topic, that she feels that the only way to get better is to kill herself, which is a really uncomfortable thing to talk about. But Sylvia Plath never backs down from a challenge. We always know what Esther is thinking, sometimes she doesn't have the best thoughts but Sylvia always say it no matter how awkward or uncomfortable it is, "After that, Buddy took me out into a hall where they had some big glass bottles full of babies that had died before they were born" (63). This shows that Esther sees all kinds of weird things that don't even phase her. She saw dead babies and she didn't even care. This makes Sylvia Plath's even more controversial, even more difficult to read but it also makes her writing more compelling. When the reader thinks that the novel might get boring Sylvia Plath makes things more interesting.

My favorite scene from the novel is when Esther is the hospital after she almost over doses and the doctors are asking her how she is and she is getting aggravated with them, "I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say 'fine'" (177).  I really like this part because it shows how real she is, she always says whatever she is feeling. And how she is also in a way messing with the doctors. She knows that they want her to say that she's fine but she tells them that she is feeling "lousy" to try to get them to pay more attention to her.

Finally, I would definitely recommend this novel to anyone who wants to read anything that isn't like your usual novel. This novel is really different, and interesting and that's what makes it so good. The novel also really shows what its like to be so depressed like that, but also makes it easy to relate to even though not everyone is like Esther. She tells stories that the reader can really connect to even though Esther can be really hard to relate to.