Bokrecension: The Bell Jar av Sylvia Plath

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The Bell Jar is a disturbing book. It deals with youth in a way that no other book I have read have managed to do. It is observative and cynical, yet brings hope in the madness. The influence of J.D Salingers Catcher in the Rye can’t go by unnoticed, but where Catcher in the Rye is based on an immature point of view, stereotypical authority and satire, The Bell Jar is thoughtful, complicated and honest.

Esther Greenwood is Sylvia Plaths alter ego in this autobiographical novel. Under seven months the story follows her when she is a summer guest-editor at a fashion magazine in New York, when she returns home to the suburbs of Boston, and when she has a mental breakdown and recovers. The thing that makes The Bell Jar so likable I think, is that everyone can relate to Esther. She is both capable and disappointing, clever and naïve. One of her most significant characteristics is her neuroticism. She has a hard time deciding between things.

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at once and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days. ”(p. 90)

Maybe that could be a good thing, but in Esther’s case I see it as a bad. All the time she spends deciding, she wastes opportunities to actually accomplish something.

The substance in The Bell Jar is in my opinion the second half. It is after she comes home from New York that her troubles really begin. The first sign of her breakdown is when she tries to write a novel, but can’t get past the first paragraph. She then tries to read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for her college honors thesis, but finds that the letters grows barbs and rams’ horn, separates from each other and jiggles up and down in a silly way.
After that the plot becomes a case history of clinical depression. Esther experiences that she becomes empty, and can’t sleep. The descriptions of every aspect of depression are described clear and matter-of-factly, and lyrical at the same time. An example of this is Esther’s final suicide attempt. After a range of tried out methods (razor blades, hanging, drowning) Esther swallows a great number of sleeping pills.

“The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep. ”(p. 160)

The Bell Jar is rich of perspective on life and death, and as valuable for people suffering from depression themselves, as for people d...