Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York. HarperCollins Publishers: 1996.
After reading the book A Million Little Pieces, I wanted to read another book similar to the plot of that book. I decided to read this book because it was recommended to me by my friend Anna and this book had a similar plot to the book I last read. This book isn't really an autobiography but it does include some invents that relate to the author's personal life. So I would say that this is still a fictional novel. This book takes place in New York City and in the Boston suburbs. It also takes place in a hospital that is around Boston. The time period that this book takes place in was during the 1950's.
This book was about how a young woman's experience leads to her insanity. Esther Greenwood is an intern at a fashion magazine after winning a scholarship. During this time, different events happened that led to her mental breakdown. Esther had to choose which way she wanted to go, whether to marry her boyfriend Buddy Willard or continue her passion of writing poetry and stories. Esther then decides to break up with Buddy after she visited him at his college and she decided to enroll in a summer program for writers but was rejected. The rejection to the summer program and the thought of having to spend her life with someone like Buddy may not be the life that she wanted to live. In my opinion, it was a life that she didn't want to face. More one in the book, she talks about her life in the hospital after a failed suicide attempt.
Esther Greenwood behaves in an unconventional way and struggles to live her life in an oppressive environment. She doesn't like people telling her what to do and how to live her life. The society she lives in expects her to have sex to a guy with manners after marriage. Although like her boyfriend Buddy, she didn't want to wait and saw the hypocrisy of this rule. The way her society affects her doesn't make her mad but led her to a suicide attempt. Because of Esther's mental illness, she starts to behave selfishly. She doesn't consider the effect her suicide attempts have on her mother and friends. She is an interesting character, although I saw her as a predictable character, meaning she those type of characters who lives a life that is going her way but leads to having illness or something going wrong in her life.
I liked reading this book, although I didn't really enjoyed it. I liked how the author wrote this book in a descriptive way and used personification throughout the book. I think this book talks about how to overcome things and I think it's a good book to learn from. Although I can't say it's my favorite, I would recommend it to others because it's pretty interesting how one event leads to another and ends up changing her life.
This is the only book that Sylvia Plath wrote but she did publish a few poetry of her own. She based the characters in her story to the people she knows which is why this book does relate to her own life. Although in the book, she ends with Esther recovering her illness, Plath took her own life on February 11, 1963 by placing her head in the oven while the gas was on.Labels: Book Report