Analysis Of The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

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Whenever I imagine a bell jar, the bell jar from Beauty and the Beast comes to mind. The beast’s whole life was entrapped because of the rose in the bell jar. As the rose petals dropped, Beast’s chance at becoming a human again, dwindled. The bell jar, an airtight cage, slowly suffocated the rose and him. You could say the same for Ester Greenwood from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the bell jar represents suffocation from her mental illness, slowly engulfing her sanity and the air she breathes. The bell jar also represents her losing a connection to reality and to people around her. The protagonist is trapped in the walls of glass, it slowly suffocated her sense of reality and sense of belonging in her world. Ester Greenwood, the protagonist
There were many events that links Ester to Plath’s own life. Unfortunately, Plath was trapped in a bell jar as well, but unlike Ester she couldn’t escape it.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is recognized as an autobiography. But The Bell Jar was also laced with fictional events. Plath was inspired by Catcher and the Rye by J.D. Salinger, as you can see that the protagonists both have similar struggles to find a sense of themselves in an adult world. You could say that Plath was living through her character Ester, she imagined herself getting better and escaping that bell jar that held her in its inescapable glass walls. The Bell jar follows the protagonist Ester Greenwood and her descent into mental illness. It narrates a story of her successful beginnings where she won a writing internship in New York (1). But when she got there, everything slowly started to crumble and her descent into madness began. Ester struggles to
It marks a day of sadness (Biography). On a dreary winter day, a year dubbed the Big freeze of 1963, Plath had unfortunately succumbed to her mental illness. She took her life by sticking her head in an oven. Unfortunately to Plath, every breath she took gave her misery, Mental illnesses are terrible disease, because you are in a prison, your brain holds you captive to abnormal thoughts and behaviors. It keeps you in a loop of misery, all you can think about is every terrible thing that has happened to you. It’s like focusing a magnifying glass over on ant, focus the sunlight on the ant and it slowly burns it and kills it, you can say the same for the thoughts that Plath had, those thoughts slowly burned her and ultimately caused her death. People with mental illness cannot just fix themselves by telling themselves everything will be ok, a mental illness is like a black hole, it keeps you in an everlasting darkness, you see no way out. So, the only way out your brain makes sense is to end it, end the suffering. Especially since, modern medicine is not reliable for the treatment of mental illness, in 1963 it was even more unreliable. To her life was meaningless, she had been battling a mental illness since she was a young girl. Being held captive by your own brain is simply madness, you feel helpless that you can’t do anything to fix it. It combined with the strive to be perfect, it’s hard for people

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