Assignment for 10/5 - Plath

Reading depression is always uncomfortable, especially when it’s done well. Sylvia Plath does it well. The zombie voice that makes decisions the person behind it never makes, the way there is nothing to do but endure, waiting for the next thing to go wrong, feeling the weight of everything that remains unknown as a personal failure, all of that is made inevitably believable. Given Plath’s history, it is no surprise that she can write about depression so accurately.

The writing in this excerpt is uncomfortable. It begins with the italicised statemend, “The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian.” (112) This is not a useful comparison, because a “sick Indian” is not an image that readily forms in the mind. A “sick person” would, but a “sick Indian” is off, slightly racist, playing on assumptions that no one has. As well, having a face stand in for an entire human figure is wrong. The mass is wrong, the scale is off. From the first line, the world is already not behaving the way it is supposed to.

The narrator, unnamed until the seventh page of the chapter, is alone while travelling, a common occurance in literature. Trains, planes, long car trips, these are all good places to insert some exposition, or a character study, or some action that will give the reader more information. When the narrator, “dropped the compact into my pocketbook,” it shows a certain carelessness for things. (12) The scenery is not seen as a whole. It is a, “colossal junkyard, the swamps and back lots of Connecticut flashed past, one broken-down fragment bearing no relation to another.” (12) This could so easily have gone the other way. All the things in a junkyard are connected by their presence in the junkyard. There are connections to make, but the narrator is not making them, and claiming that they do not exist at all.

First-person narration creates automatic subjectivity, since having only one point of view means that you are relying on one character for all your information. The narrator is the character, and the implied author sneaks in there, too. In this piece, it highlights Esther’s loneliness. Since Esther-as-author is choosing this form of narration, the loneliness is to a certain extent self-imposed.

Reading The Bell Jar is complicated by the knowledge that this novel was intended to be autobiographical, and that Plath killed herself. It is as if the novel has an end beyond the last page, and that end is the more final one. The author has merged with the writing. So to say, as I did in the last paragraph, that Esther is the author of her own story, and has chosen the first-person point of view, and that she could have chosen something else, is to say that if it had been in third-person, Esther would still have been the author. Even in limited third-person, there is no question that the narrator is the one telling the story, with the implied author and author making up that particular holy trinity. Esther would no longer be the author. But I made the assumption that the possibility existed, because I know that Esther is, to a greater extent than usual, Sylvia. That she was meant by Sylvia to be a mirroring of Sylvia. Perhaps Esther is Sylvia’s face reflected in the train window. A ghost. Because of Sylvia’s death, Esther remains as her ghost-in-print, immortal in some limited first-person way.