The Bell Jar Over All of Us

“I am I am I am” so happy that I decided to go to Barnes & Noble the other day. Usually, I have quite a disdain for it. The people are usually rude, old, or fake; the coffee sucks because it’s not a REAL Starbucks;

and none of the employees seem to have a clue about what’s in stock, let alone what a book is. But I was dragged there by my brother who was quite eager to get a new book on plants (don’t ask). It was there that I saw the holy grail: buy 2 get 1 free table of good books! Not those books that try too hard or don’t try hard enough (I mean, do we really need another celebrity bio???),but just really great reads. I bought Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World which I never had the pleasure of reading (one of my friends left it on the flight to Russia) and another fiction novel that I haven’t even looked at. But for my third book, I decided to pick up The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

I guess that once in a great while, people encounter things that really affect their lives, and this book was one of them. Within the first three lines, I was hooked. I skipped my school lunches and used my free time to submerge myself into the world that Esther resided. I used her misery to block out my own emotional stress and fatigue that comes with going to a prep school. Her world felt like my own private hidey-hole. But imagine my surprise to find that most of these encounters were true, taken right from Sylvia’s life. Now, I was not just living in a fantasy world, but her life vicariously through the retrospective voice of Ester Greenwood.

It amazes me what the human body and mind can survive. To feel oneself “under a bell jar” and still go through life acting as if nothing is wrong until the emotions full up inside and it becomes too much to hide from people and they start noticing something is going wrong and you just give up entirely and then you get to the point where nothing is worth anything at all and you just burst and decide it’s the end. How do people survive that?

Needless to say, I was absolutely amazed with this book. It sucked me in with the matter-of-fact way that Plath narrates and her double-edged humor. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone. The Bell Jar will definitely go into my favorite book pile and hold a special place in my heart. I can’t wait to explore more of Plath’s poetry and observe her growth as a poet as I read more of her works.

And even though I know that she did kill herself, there's something about this book that reminds me to keep going. And that's something that you can't get from an everyday author, but from someone talented enough to express what she suffered.

"Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope"

James Matthew Barrie