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Similes
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis:
The style of The Bell Jar is deeply personal and reflective, focusing on Esther’s own mental state as she moves through high-society environments in New York City and then returns to her small hometown in the Boston suburbs. Esther spends much of her time alone before she is moved to a mental health care facility, and she reflects extensively on her own feelings of loneliness and alienation:
The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.
Esther returns to her hotel room after an unsuccessful social outing, during which Doreen flirts with a boy while Esther watches silently. In her hotel room, she looks out the window and senses a profound “silence” despite the noise of the busy city. The silence, she notes, is her “own” silence, a reflection of her own inner thoughts and feelings. The window itself appears to her like nothing more than a “poster” of the city, an environment that she cannot truly interact with despite, in fact, living there for the month. This passage exemplifies the personal, reflective style of the novel in general, which tends to focus on Esther’s own thought processes and emotions.
