Summary Of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

According to “In the US, 1 in 5 Teens Have a Serious Mental Illness” by Live Science Staff, as the title of the article suggests, one in five—or 20%—of teens suffer from mental illness. For depression alone, around 15% of teens suffer. Esther, the main character of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, is one of the millions of teens who suffer from a mental illness. The Bell Jar is a dark, twisted novel that takes its reader on a journey inside Esther’s mind, a brilliant and beautiful writer who begins to crack. Several themes are present in Plath’s novel; the role of women in the 1950s, the stigma of mental illness—however, the most prominent theme is the process of pain and rebirth. As the novel progresses, we see Esther’s trip to New York go awry, how she thinks as someone admitted to an asylum, the mistreatment and expectations of women in the 1950s. Despite the fact that The Bell Jar was written fifty years prior to when I had read it,

Esther and Buddy Willard’s interactions were kept awkward and clipped. Perhaps the awkarndness was to show how wrong Buddy and Esther were for each other—perhaps it was to show how much Esther looked down on Buddy. In another way, it could just show how much Plath did not care for their interactions, and perhaps that was exactly the reason Plath refused to develop their relationship in a good light. Difficulties are experienced when trying to describe how the characters acted, because it felt like I was watching a claymation of unfeeling Frankensteins. While I was with Esther on her way to mental insanity, I could not relate to her as much as I thought I could, simply because of the way she talked and how she interacted with her relationships, not entirely due to the fact that she was admitted to a mental asylum, as one would think. For a lack of better words, Esther’s interactions were kept