In the end we start thinking about the beginning
One thing I found myself thinking about as I read The Bell Jar was, when did this all start? In the beginning, I was feeling the same confusion and disappointment. Ester was feeling her lack of enthusiasm and joy during her internship. It was obvious from the beginning that something had already gone really, really wrong. Ester didn’t know about chemical imbalances or any of the other “modern-day" scientific analyses of what causes shifts in mental health. Now, most readers can identify her depression as a pathological physical state of her body—something akin to POTS or Crohn's disease. Yet, there is a profound shift in her illness from the beginning to the end of the book that I don’t think can just be attributed to the momentum that poor physiology (especially mental illnesses, because those often make it extra hard to engage in behaviors that would help you get better) has. It is certainly possible that there's no other reason for her descent into suicid...