Alex and tabs book club

Every time I saw the bell jar on social media or in a book store, I skipped over it. I didn’t ever read the summary and just assumed it was something I would not be interested in. It was written in 1961 which I thought would be too early for my taste.

My friend started reading The Bell Jar and that made me look up what the book was about and I realized… Wow this book would be perfect for me to read. I went to the book store the next day and I started to read.

I had taken a short break from reading because I thought I did not have enough time to read but I took a step back and reevaluated my schedule and day. I realized the amount of time I spent on public transport to go to my research lab that I would spend staring out the window. I realized that when I took breaks from my school work I would go on my phone. I changed my schedule and started reading during these times and I have finished 4 books in two weeks! I find so much joy that I am spending more time reading and embracing this wonderful hobby. I look forward to reading so many more book this school semester!

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath comes with some triggering scenes and moments as it unravels the topic of depression and suicide. The main character Esther, has a mental illness and the plot is revolving around her illness, how she was treated by doctors and others around her, and her recovery. It is full of poetic language and imagery.

The bell jar is a metaphor in the book for Esthers disconnect from the world around her and the suffocating condition she is struggling with. I think the most fascinating thing reading this book was the fact that it was written in 1961. This stands out to me because the same themes of mental illness still exist in 2024, 62 years later, and it is relatable and depicted so raw and truthfully. It goes to show how some things are natural to the human body and do not change with time.

This is all time one of my favorite books. I would recommend this book to someone who is comfortable reading about these difficult topics. This is important because the novel is very difficult to read and some points and is very honest.

I am going to share some quotes that I highlighted while reading the novel. Some of these quotes are very distressing and hard to read but show the complexities of this novel and the extend of Esther’s illness.

“How all the little successes I’d totted up so happily in college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate glass front along Madison Avenue”

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life”

“only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley- bus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo”

“girls like that made me sick. I’m so jealous I can’t speak”

“its like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel its really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing way from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour”

“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. the city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well have been there at all, for the good it did me.”

“I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together”

“she stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make she , moment by moment , that she continued to exist”

“I didn’t want my picture because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that ig anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full”

“I felt limp and betrayed, like the skin she by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on”

“I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the cuts mystery and magnificent might rub on to me at last”

“piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and fluttering like a loved ones ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York”

my mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but If I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through the circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.

“so I told him again in the same dull, flat voice, only it was angrier this time, because he seemed so slow to understand, how I hadn’t slept for fourteen nights and how I couldn’t read or write or swallow very well”

“a fine drizzle started drifting down from the gray sky, and I grew very depressed”