Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar: A Second Copy Of Life

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A Second Copy of Life

“My heroine would be myself, only in disguise…There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.” In Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, there were many examples of things that correlated between Esther Greenwood and Sylvia Plath’s lives. For example, the characters were drawn together by the intention they both had of killing themselves, their risk factors, the events that pushed them to suicidal thoughts, and the once–and–for–all decision of life or death. Esther’s intention of causing her own death was obvious. She tested out ways and even attempted to kill herself other times. The ways she harmed herself were attempting to drown herself, cutting, hanging, overdose, and burying herself alive. These attempts could not happen on accident, therefore the idea that her death was intentional came into play. This related to Sylvia herself because she too physically harmed her own body. She tried to slit her own throat when she was 10, she gashed her own legs, drove her car off a road, cut herself, and tried gassing herself as she stuck her head in an oven. The two women had many …show more content…

When Buddy Willard convinced Esther that she was more experienced and sexual than he was, she believed him. This was the time when she thought about losing her virginity. When she found out Buddy had an affair with a waitress and that he was not as innocent as he said he was, it upset Esther. A second event that pushed Esther to suicide was her rejection from the writing course. She had prepared for and looked forward to this course for so long. When her mom harshly broke the news to her, she was extremely upset. These situations were comparable with Sylvia Plath because after her husband, Ted Hughes, left her for another woman, she fell into deep depression and struggled with mental illness. She went through many struggles that pushed her to

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