The Bell Jar

As in Lolita, the body parts of the main character in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar move and exist on their own, observed but not controlled by their owner. A face of a “sick Indian” is seen in the mirror. “My mouth shaped itself sourly” has the same level of attachment to its subject as “The twin bed next to mine was empty and unmade.”

“I reached for the receiver.

My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp. I forced it to the receiver again, but again it stopped short, as if it had collided with a pane of glass.

I wandered into the dining room.”

This passage highlights the two main methods of detachment I noticed in this chapter. The first I have already mentioned. Esther is so disassociated with herself that she actually fights her own body- and loses. It is not her that is unable to call her friend back, it is her hand.

The second is the use of short, one-sentence paragraphs that break up the comparatively longer paragraphs, almost as non sequiturs. I wasn’t sure how these were making me feel at first. The longer paragraphs almost begin to have a flow. She describes her actions and her surroundings, but then that paragraph is over, like eyes closing, and she is somewhere else, taken somewhere away by one thought. This creates silence throughout the text and a stopping and starting, hesitating relation of events and thoughts.