The Bell Jar

In the reading, The Bell Jar, the character herself has qualified the symptom of a depressive episode. The depressive episode should fulfill with at least four symptoms such as significant weight loss (gain) or an increase of appetite, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation or retardation, fatigue or loss of energy, feeling of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt, diminished ability to concentrate or indecisiveness, recurrent thoughts of suicide or death. As she mentioned “…but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.”(McCann, 2012, p.1), “I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver’s head around with me on the string.” (McCann, 2012, p.2) Both of these two dialogues between herself show her feelings are similar to the sense of death. Although she didn’t mention any suicidal tendency, it is clear that “burned alive” and “cadaver’s head” should do something with what happened to her “last summer.” As for depressive episode it should also within two weeks period, and she did notice that “something was wrong with me that summer…”. (McCann, 2012, p.2) Apart from this, she was treating herself as a victim toward the world. It gives us the notion that she has a victim awareness about the trauma that she left behind and trying to cover that with negative speeches about New York and how she is unsuccessful. She also might has the symptom of changing her appetite, by described any food as either an irritating smells or related to death, according to, “fusty- peanut-smelling mouth of every subway” (McCann, 2012, p.1) and “… the cadaver’s head— or what there was left of it — floated up behind the eggs and bacon at breakfast…”.(McCann, 2012, p.2) She assumed that she is not enjoying her life by keeping repetitive emphasizing “ I was supposed to…” “I should have been…” or “I couldn’t ” all of these appear as a self-worthless symptom.

Moreover, the narration has a repetitive word by using “I,” it could also be seen that she is a self-focus person and being restless about her life. Everything that happened one her got exaggerated and full of different description, all the small things that people won’t notice or heard were also vividly and metaphorically interpret. However, at the end of the reading, she said: “ I couldn’t get myself react.”(McCann, 2012, p.3) Either in positive or negative things. She defiantly got distracted by reality and became emotional towards her imagination. At the end of the reading, she references herself as “A girl”(McCann, 2012, p.3) which implies her treating herself as an object and trying to detach the past away from her self-esteem. Last, although it’s a novel, the girl uses the majority of past tense in her confession talking some happy moments that she felt cherish about, which unconsciously indicates that she is a nostalgic person, besides highlighting her depressive moment that she refused to admit.

Reference:

McCann, J. (2012). The bell jar. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press.