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I decided to read The Bell Jar as it has been sitting on my book trolley for a while now and as I was preparing my bag for my work trip to London, the book just grabbed my attention. As it’s only 294 pages, I thought it would be a great read for a 4 hour round-trip. I also have a beautiful copy of the 2001 edition by Faber and Faber.
SYNOPSIS: The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
REVIEW: First of all, I think one trope that I love is complicated, self-destructive narrators, especially female narrators and our protagonist and narrator, Esther Greenwood, is exactly that. She is a complicated and slightly unreliable narrator who quite clearly has a very destructive personality and damaging relationship with basically everyone around her, from her fellow colleagues at the magazine and ‘friends’, to the strange men she meets, her ex-boyfriend and her mother.
I guess for me, the book felt like it fell into two parts. Part one, in my opinion, was Esther’s life when she was living and working in New York with a bunch of other young women for a magazine. Even this storyline was weird too - she was obviously an intern at the magazine but her boss would plan out the girls’ days and book events for them to go to which seemed very inappropriate. In this part of the book, Esther seems to be enjoying her time in New York but hating her time at the magazine even though she wants to be an accredited writer. She doesn’t seem to care about anything other than getting attention from the people around her. She consistently makes reference to how the other girls on the internship are so rich they are bored but I think she was bored too.
Another part of the story was the constant mention of a boy named 'Buddy Willard', who seems to be Esther’s ex love interest. As the book develops, we learn more and more about this far from normal relationship and how Buddy became Esther’s obsession.
I’d then say that part two of the book is after Esther leaves her internship in New York and heads back home after an awful event with the guy in the alley and finding out she didn't get onto the writing course she wanted. Part two for me was a completely different book/story from part one. Esther becomes more and more psychotic after returning home and subsequently, the whole narrative becomes very jumpy in the second part of the book which I think Plath wanted to include to demonstrate Esther's state of mind.
Although the second part of the book was difficult to read, I did find the first part o the book to be really easy to read and quite encapsulating. It was clear that Esther was a very self-destructive and chaotic character who I think got a kick out of shocking the people around her by doing quite out of the ordinary things. I found her sometimes to be quite an unreliable character because in the second part of the book, she keeps saying how she isn’t sleeping but the doctors around her are telling her they saw her sleeping. I did like this impact of the book and even though it was quite shockingly disturbing, I did find Plath’s humour, as well as pain, coming through the book which was quite something to experience. I’d also say that as this book was written in 1963, some parts of the narrative haven't aged well and there is a lot of reference to suicide, mental health and abuse.
READ THIS IF:
🔔 You enjoy modern classics
🔔 You love books with a complicated protagonist
🔔 You want a quick, pacey read
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