It never occurred to me to say no.

– The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

At the moment I cannot name a book with a more devastating effect on me than Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Until recently, Plath was one of those authors I only knew by name and brief anecdotal facts. But instead of wishing to have met her when I was younger, I content myself with the mere fact that I will never forget her novel.

As I was turning its pages, more often than not it seemed like The Bell Jar was reading into me. This is not an entirely new sensation, because other writers are just as capable of intimately piercing prose. Plath, however, has the rare power of poets, the unattainable talent for molding images and letters into unexpectedly perfect shapes. Paul Celan, for instance, acts in the same way on me. These artists only need few, precise words to express with delicate severity the sort of feeling one experiences during uncomfortable situations, that is when in their heart they know what they are going through but at the same time they are utterly inadequate at describing it. This is something that happens to me all the time. When it does, I usually prefer a wall of silence rather than trying unconvincingly to collect one hazy sentence after the other. Reading Plath makes me fully aware of how nearly impossible is to master the art of language.

Nevertheless, despite her ability with words, Esther Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist and Plath’s alter ego on paper, can never grasp the world she lives in. She is actually telling the story of the irreconcilable difference between herself and everything else. The introspection, though, is not instrumental to a better understanding of the world, or of herself for that matter. She doesn’t try to make sense of anything at all, because the world simply moves at another pace altogether. She is young, her intellectual heft and emotional depth are out of question, and yet peace, comfort, and ease don’t have a place for her. Her sliding into depression is shockingly natural, since there doesn’t seem to be any other option available to her. I don’t think ever before had I wanted so desperately to hug a character and being of any help.

I was taken aback at the sudden realisation that I was accepting her deteriorating state of mind as something inevitable. The point is that the bell jar trapping Esther works in the other way too. Family, friends, ex-lovers, doctors, and us readers, everyone is locked outside of the bell jar. She is alone. She sees through the bell jar, but nobody sees her. They watch her, instead, unable to help her out of there, pointlessly moving around her solitude.

How much Esther is aware of the full extent of her condition I cannot say. She rejects any sort of attempt at lifting the bell jar. She is defenseless, obviously, but she somehow knows that whatever everyone is trying to do for her is not the right thing. This is a character truly out of their time, which doesn’t imply that were Esther to be born in a different age her life would have been easier and painless. In fact, I don’t think Esther could ever been saved, here or elsewhere. The categories and intellectual structures she has at her disposal aren’t suitable for a world that reduces everything setting itself apart from the norm to a mistake to be fixed or a disease to be cured. Esther is a question mark in a world full of assertions and descriptions that make no sense unless we accept the bell jar for what it really is, which is the reason why we don’t understand each other.