"The Bell Jar"

I want to talk about the dark side of the novel for a little bit. The novel has dark periods throughout when we wonder what is going through Esther’s head. One of the main things I would like to talk about would be how Esther constantly thinks if ways to commit suicide. I know it’s not a normal topic of conversation, But I feel it is necessary to talk about because it is so prevalent within the novel.

She thinks of committing suicide like it was a choice of picking between wearing shoes or heels. It doesn’t faze her at all which, while reading, makes you wonder what is going on in her head. At first she tried to slit her wrists in a bath while her mother is gone to work. She tried this way because an old Roman philosopher had said that’s the way he would want to commit suicide. She obviously didn’t go through with it because if she had the book would have ended there. She doesn’t because the skin of her wrists “looked so white and defenseless”. If you ask me, she likes the idea of committing suicide because she wants to escape, but when it comes to the actual deed she can’t imagine killing herself. She also goes on to try and drown herself but each time she tried to dive down she “popped up like a cork”. She said she knew when she was “beaten” but again, I think she was afraid. Then she tried to hang herself by putting her mother’s silk bathroom cord around her neck and pulling. Yet again, she didn’t go through it but this time she blamed her body because it “had all sorts of little tricks” that made her let go of the cord. She had one other final attempt that almost worked if her mother hadn’t found her. She decided to overdose on the pills that her mom would normally give her each night. She took them all and crawled into a small space in her basement and laid there. After a while it starts to get annoying to read about all of her attempts because we know she isn’t going to go through with it.

To me, I feel as though she really wants attention and trying to commit suicide seems like a quick attention seeking endeavor. Others might disagree with me, but I was thinking it throughout the whole novel. I know she is mentally ill and all, but to me she just kept making up excuses as to why she didn’t sacrifice her life. Deep down she knew she didn’t want to die she just wanted to escape and she picked the most deadly route. I believe that it was her subconscious preventing herself from doing it and not her body like she says. Don’t get me wrong either, I truly feel bad for Esther and everything she is going through, mental illness isn’t a minor issue. I also feel as though this was how Sylvia Plath felt before she committed suicide herself. This novel reads like her life and these were probably her thoughts and feelings on the subject of suicide. Esther trying to find a way to commit suicide could have been Sylvia trying to figure out what she was going to do.

Again, I know this is a morbid subject that I have discussed in this entry. I would like to end it off by saying that mental illness can strike anyone and suicide will most likely feel like the best route in escaping everything. This is clear in Esther’s suicide attempts and Sylvia Plath’s actual suicide.