The Bell Jar: 1st Half summary

The first chapter, introduces the main character, Esther Greenwood. The story is narrated in first person, but in the first chapter she mentions how she has a baby now, which leads you to believe that the story is being told in the future. Esther, who is a college student at the time of the story, is doing an internship in New York. While she knows that most girls would envy her for all of the expensive gifts and clothes she gets for free, and for the glamorous parties she gets to attend, but for some reason, it does not excite her the way she thinks it should. One night, when her friend Doreen and her are in a cab on their way to a party thrown by their magazine, a man approaches their cab and asks them to join him and his friends at a bar. His name is Larry and they decide to go with him, because Esther wants to see New York from a different perspective besides the carefully planned out events of the magazine. Larry appeared to be very interested in Doreen, but Esther was not interested in his friend. In the second chapter, Doreen, Larry and Esther all end up going back to his apartment, but Esther gets frustrated while they are flirting and danced and walks home 48 blocks. When she gets home, she relaxes in the tub for a long time, because she feels as if soaking in the tub is dissolving all of the bad off of her; Lenny, and New York. Doreen comes back really drunk, really later, and tried to get Esther to let her into her room, but Esther leaves her in the hallway, where she vomits, and Esther vows that she will continue to be Doreen’s friend, but have no real attachment to her. In the third Chapter, the girls are all at a luncheon thrown by the magazine, minus Doreen who was with Lenny. Esther recalls that morning, when she decline hanging out with Doreen and Lenny for the day and decided to skip the fur show that they were supposed to attend as well and spend the day in bed. When one of the girls asks her why she wasn’t there, she started to cry, because Jay Cee, their boss had called her and asked her into her office and asked her if she was enjoying her job, and what she wants to do when she graduated college. Although Esther usually had a scripted out line as a response, when Jay Cee asked, she simply responded “I don’t know”, but then tries to save herself and says that she was thinking about going into publishing. Jay Cee tells her that it would be in her best interest to learn a couple languages if she wants to be a competitive publisher, but this stresses Esther out, because she does not feel that there is time in her schedule to take up a language. You can tell in this chapter that Esther is starting to feel like there is no direction in her life, and she seems unhappy. In the next chapter, Jay Cee had sent Esther off to do some work and then to the banquet. After the banquet the girls go to a movie premier. Half way through, all of the girls start feeling sick and decide to leave the theatre, and they throw up all the way home. Esther collapses in the hallway and wakes up to a nurse putting her into bed and Doreen informs her later that all of the girls have food poisoning from the crab. The next morning, Esther gets a phone call from Constantin, who is a friend of Mrs. Willard, who is a friend of her mothers. Mrs. Willard has a son, Buddy, who wants to marry Esther, but she loathes him. In his recent letters Buddy seems to be making more of an attempt, such as telling her that he found a poem written by a doctor, which shows that he has changed his way of thinking that doctors and writers do not get along. When the first started dating, Esther was really interested in him, he asked her to the Yale Junior Prom, where he treated her like a friend, but kissed her afterwards. The next chapter, Esther thinks back to a lot of events in their relationship, including watching a baby being born for a lecture. After the lecture Buddy asked her if she had ever seen a naked man and continued to take off his clothed. He then admitted to her that he slept with a women from his summer job in Cape Cod. She broke up with him, because she was angry that he presented himself as pure, but really wasn't. All of these events and memories play important roles in the ending of the novel, and revealing the important things in her life.