The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
read: circa 2008
Guardian 1000 Novels

"Franny," the short story about Franny Glass' mental breakdown that begins Franny and Zooey, brought to mind The Bell Jar, another story about the mental disintegration of a young woman who is sick of the shallow world around her.  Lane going on about the brilliance of his paper on Flaubert mirrors the superficial conversations Esther Greenwood had in New York bars while interning at Ladies' Day magazine.  A possibility both books raise is that what we think of as insanity is in fact a rational response to the meaninglessness and falseness of Life In the Real World.  It's hard not to see Sylvia Plath's suicide and J.D. Salinger's reclusion as ultimate endorsements of this mentality, and it's hard to read The Bell Jar (like Infinite Jest or Nirvana's In Utero) without seeing omens foreshadowing the artist's eventual destruction.