The Bell Jar: Chapter 20 Summary & Analysis

It’s January and Esther will soon return to college. She has only to pass next week’s interview with a board of doctors and she’ll be free to go. Dr. Nolan has warned her frankly that most people at college will act awkwardly around her or avoid her altogether, treating her “like a leper with a warning bell.” Her mother has visited and invited Esther to put the past away like “a bad dream.” But, Esther thinks, “to the person in the bell jar…the world itself is the bad dream” and she can’t forget any of the experiences of her mental illness, that they are her “part of [her]” now. Later Esther wonders what the real difference is between girls at Belsize and the girls at college, who also “sat under bell jars of a sort.”

Buddy comes to the asylum to visit Esther. She expects to feel some twinge at seeing him, but feels nothing. His car is stuck in a snowdrift and she digs it out for him, though, when she first offers to, he looks at her with “the same compound of curiosity and wariness” that Esther detected in the eyes of all her guests at the asylum. She laughingly reminds Buddy that she’s “all right” and that it’s he, not she, who shouldn’t exert himself.

Over tea, Buddy asks Esther the question he’s come to ask, wanting to know if she thinks that there’s something about him that “drives women crazy.” His manner is newly “grave, even tentative,” lacking his old confident bravado. Esther thinks it is the face of a man “who often does not get what he wants.” She assures him that he is not at fault for her or Joan’s illness. Inwardly, Esther recalls Dr. Nolan angrily reprimanding her for blaming herself for Joan’s death. Dr. Nolan had assured her that even “the best of psychiatrists has suicides among their patients” and that Joan was the only person responsible for her death.

The day before her interview, Esther walks the asylum grounds, bidding farewell to Valerie’s “calm, snow-maiden face behind which so little, bad or good, could happen.” Esther wonders if the bell jar will descend on her again on the future. She worries, too, who she will marry now that she’s been institutionalized, thinking back to Buddy’s question which he’d asked on his visit “as if to revenge himself for my digging out the car and his having to stand by, ‘I wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther.’”

Esther calls Irwin to remind him to pay the bill for her Emergency Room visit after their affair. When he asks when he’ll get to see her again, Esther tells him ‘Never,’ and feels “unaccountably weak-kneed and relieved” at being “perfectly free.”

Esther remembers how she had attended Joan’s funeral and thought of the hole in the ground where “that shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in whiteness and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan’s grave.” She had heard her own heart make its “old brag…I am, I am, I am.”

Preparing to enter her interview, Esther has none of the certainty and knowledge she’d hoped to have upon leaving the asylum. She sees the asylum librarian, an alumna of the asylum, and wonders “how she knew she had really graduated at all.” Esther thinks that there should be “a ritual for being born twice.” As she is trying to think of one, Dr. Nolan gestures into the room. Approaching the familiar faces and eyes of the doctors, Esther steps into the room.