Critical Analysis Of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

A struggling career, disillusionment in men, societal pressures, and deep depression all strike Esther Greenwood at once and leaves herself lost in the world. In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the main character Esther Greenwood realizes her failing writing career, and that innocence has affected her more than she thought. Thus, Esther struggles to find her place in the world and goes mad, making several suicide attempts (Plath). During this string of bad luck and coming to terms, she goes through depression and detachment from her emotions (Plath). Therefore, the author argues that disillusionment leads to madness.

Plath’s reinforces her argument through extensive use of negative diction and tone such as detached, abrupt, ailing, and defeated

Obviously, Esther has both physical and mental issues as she cannot do most of the essential things people do in their daily life, like most importantly: eating and sleeping. Esther’s mental ailments include her disillusionment that actions have no purpose or meaning as everyone only ends up the same way in the end: dead. Her depressive thoughts eat at her until a level of madness is reached. All of her problems quoted are an effect of the climax when she is denied access into a writing class. When Esther’s condition worsened, she attempts to kill herself several times, once on a beach date with her friends. During this trip Esther swims out as far as she could and decides to force herself to drown, but fails. Plath uses defeated diction with several words like “panting”, “strenuous exertion”, “I dived and dived again”, “popped”, “mocked me”, “beaten”, and “turned back” (Plath 161) establish her failure in killing herself. In this case the defeated diction turns out in a positive outcome because Esther’s body will not physically kill itself. In contrast, Esther attempting to kill herself in this way shows that