The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath's prose seems to take the verb style more than anything we've read so far. The curious thing about it is that, in showing how insane her narrator is, she writes sentences that demonstrate the narrator either doing this, or processing things as they happen. Quite like with Joyce, objects have a sense of agency, and we continue to watch them perform a variety of tasks, "Pale green loopy ferns and spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on teh end table and the coffee table and the magazine table." (127). This sentence seems to contain all of the techniques that Plath uses the demonstrate the observant eye of a crazy person. The repetition of certain words and conjunctions has an exhausted quality, drawn-out and tired.

Since this chapter is meant to demonstrate Esther's plunge into insanity, the writing tends to follow suit, and it does so pretty ironically. When Esther is revealing something crucial to her condition, the sentences shorten up: "I was still wearing Betsy's white blouse and dirndl skirt. They drooped a bit now, as I hadn't washed them in my three weeks at home. The sweaty cotton gave of a sour but friendly smell. I hadn't washed my hair for three weeks, either. I hadn't slept for seven nights."The sentences become more simple as her thoughts continue, and yet the thoughts get more complex. Most the sentence-length variations occur around the word sleep, which is increasingly absent in the narrator's story.

The sentences aren't generally suspensive, and tend to work so that the narrator is doing something directly, or something else is doing something. This works differently from Nabokov, whose inner monologue dwells in thoughts and anecdotes, cries out to things that aren't present, and revolves around himself. Ester describes things flatly, just as she sees them,

perhaps to get across some sort of triviality or distaste for mundane details--or any of the things that drive her insane. The straight forward sentences are Plath's most prevalent device in expressing her character's disillusionment.