Day 698

Today I finished The Bell Jar. I have such mixed feelings about it.
At first I kinda liked it. The beginning is somewhat reminiscent of Salinger. Somewhat. Then, about halfway through the book I realized I really didn’t like what I was reading because it sounded like an upper-class, ivy league school girl complaining about all this crap and basically just being plain miserable. And who wants to read about that right? Especially when there are a million more important things to read about and a million more people with real significant problems worth listening to. To be honest, I thought it was a lot of bourgeoisie garbage. Then, a few more chapters in, I felt like I should feel sorry for this girl because she really had a serious psychiatric medical condition. I began to wonder if this was a really accurate depiction of someone’s journey through a major depressive episode and what psychiatrists think of this book. Well, I still didn’t much enjoy what I was reading but I saw the value in it so I kept on and the last chapter slightly redeemed the book for me. Slightly. I think it’s a beautiful chapter.

Part of me wants to say that everyone going into medicine should read this book because, while I’m not a doctor yet, I do feel like it’s an impressive and accurate depiction of someone going through depression. Another part of me, the non-physician, non-empathetic part, wants to say don’t bother reading this book at all. The first half is a whole lotta whining about nothing and the second half is a lot of irrational, suicidal, abstract thoughts. The style of writing is pretty good but the protagonist is not likable at all. At least not to me. And if I don’t like the protagonist, I don’t care what happens to her in the end. It’s a basic rule of storytelling. You have to get the audience to like the protagonist in some way. He could be a serial killer but you better make him have at least one redeeming quality. Otherwise, why the heck would we care what happens to him? And why the heck would we want to keep reading/watching your art?

All that said, the part of me that did care about the protagonist came from me knowing that this was a fictionalized account of actual events in Sylvia Plath’s life. Because it was a real person, I couldn’t help but caring. That’s my physician side over-ridding my artistic logic. The funny thing was, after reading the cool, concise bonus bio at the end of the book, I found myself really wanting to read Plath’s poetry. I will probably pick up a collection of her’s sometime in the near future. Something tells me she was much better at constructing a stanza than a story.