Her seemingly unlimited ambition and her pursuit of writing struck a chord with me. Throughout the first part of book, I identified closely with Esther Greenwood. Of course glass is transparent, and from some angles can even seem invisible to the naked, untrained eye of an outsider.Ī novel that seems to have barely aged since its first publishing, The Bell Jar focuses on timeless human emotions. The sea around her becomes a black void waiting to envelop her, bell jar and all, absorbing her into its unknowable depths. Through the deformations of the jar, the warm glow of the sun becomes too intense – even menacing. The world inside the bell jar seems more real, more textured than the flat distorted world outside. A bathing Esther frozen in time deciding whether to drown herself, trapped under the titular bell jar. It is the above moment in the book that I felt particularly moved to illustrate. The whole scene feels like a rather literal foreshadowing to the famous quote that appears at the end of the novel “… I am, i am, i am.” I imagine that, to her in that moment, the water felt like a portal to another world where the pain didn’t exist. She makes a silent and unannounced attempt to drown herself, but fails due to her body’s innate sense of self preservation. Esther, suffocated and disconnected, goes to the beach with her friends and a boy suggested (she speculates) by her mother. It’s been a few years since I first read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, but one scene has always stayed with me.

The bell jar near me