What Is The Ending Of The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath Explained?

I have only one question to pose here, and it is one that has intrigued me for years: Why did she write this? To survive, perhaps. Poetry was Plath’s “blood jet” after all, but in The Bell Jar she has a far larger canvas upon which to explore in more depth the compass-less world of her greatest fear: depression. The mention of shock therapy and attempts at suicide are not random. All of this is illustrated in vivid detail so that she might try to explain to the reader the unexplained aspects of her own life – that when the world demands that we want everything it can never provide the proper tools to bear the weight of it all. And yet she made it all look strangely beautiful.

This 1961 novel by the late, prolific poet Sylvia Plath has had a profound effect on many readers. Much of the book is autobiographical and thereby a culturally valuable window to the author’s particular time in life and in history, but at its best the book is also simply and effectively written. Plath drew upon her own experiences as a young woman, struggling to come to terms with the pressures placed upon her by the expectations of others as well as by her own growing mental instability. A time capsule of 1950s America for readers to see how wonderful domesticity was portrayed by 1950s society while denying any real avenues for women’s full participation. The scenes of Esther’s electroshock therapy are particularly horrifying as they show how much damage could be done to someone suffering from mental illness by the treatments prescribed by psychiatry at the time. Every generation can relate to feeling trapped in some sense – by pressures to conform, by their own thoughts, or by the world around them. This is why The Bell Jar remains a must-read so many decades after it was written. It’s not just literature – it’s a guide for those of us struggling to survive as misfits.

I was a bit hit-or-miss with the new illustrations, some were wonderful (like the new version of the fig tree), but some felt like rehashes of better ideas. But, even when the pictures weren’t so great, Plath’s words were great enough to carry the new version. It’s a good choice for something to hold while reading about the poet, but it’s not going to be for everyone. The unillustrated version is still the best.

Reading it as an extreme case of dissociation, Bateman is not connected to his actions. Instead he treats them to her as he would review a product. In the end the author is showing that this is not a personal matter of Bateman’s but rather a cultural one. Thus his lawyer’s dissociation from his confession is representative of everyone’s dissociation from the extreme evil that they facilitate in order to earn a living. The final tone is devoid of emotion and thus there is no need for explanation as there would be if there were a shared reality. Instead there are only competing simulations. And of course, in this simulation, there is plenty of ultra-violence.

Thanks for portraying Hades in a positive but stern light. I like that he is a truly opposing force to Orpheus and that he does keep his end of the bargain. But whereas Orpheus embodies chaos, emotion and art, Hades represents order, contracts and harsh reality. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but their collision of two vastly opposing worldviews is what in the end makes for such great storytelling. A force of order wins the day, but not in a boring way. It is a dark, cold and solid reality as Hades is. But, on the other hand, art, expression, human emotion and psyche are not defeated. The loud, passionate and unending song of Orpheus will live on. In the end that’s what I find really sophisticated about this story: it’s not just about good winning against evil or vice versa. It’s just that the world as it is today is better than the world that could have been.

This is really, really disturbing. And not just because she goes mad. I mean that in a very physical, specific, detailed way. The creeping. The torn paper. The fainting husband. These are images that are very difficult to eradicate from one’s memory. What is interesting about this story is the role of observation. Our writer is denied her writing, but she is a very observant woman. For most of the story she is watching the paper, the light, the pattern. But observation sooner or later leads to participation and then identification. So she observes the woman in the pattern, then she joins her, then she becomes her. The end of the story is the final stage of this process: she is now the thing that is being observed. John observed her creeping around the room and was temporarily destroyed by what he saw. He became the spectacle that she had become. The subject observes the object. But in this story the subject and the object have become completely confused. She is both the seer and the seen, the analyst and the analyzed. And in the end she has lost her mind.

I got totally caught up in how the book flips its promises in the last act — what starts like a simple romantic quest turns into something messier and much kinder. PJ really sets out with one goal: drive to the retirement community called 'Tender Hearts' to ask his high‑school love, Michelle, to marry him. The traveling cast (his strained adult daughter Sophie, two suddenly orphaned kids, and the uncanny therapy cat Pancakes) turns that promise into a chaotic, sideways family road trip instead of a straightforward proposal. Along the way the kids demand a detour to confront a soap‑opera actor they think is their dad, which goes about as well as you’d expect — it’s a comic, heartbreaking episode that exposes how desperate the kids are for roots and how imperfect adult solutions can be. That detour and several other misadventures lead them into Arizona for a funeral at Tender Hearts, and that’s where the big twist lands: PJ decides to propose, but Michelle reveals that Ed Cobb (the man she mourns) was actually PJ’s biological father, which means Michelle is his half‑sister. It’s cruelly hilarious and devastating all at once. Instead of a neat romantic finale, the ending gives PJ something else: accountability and slow repair. He and the others end up staying at Tender Hearts for a little while, PJ begins going to AA meetings, and then a phone call reveals that Ivy was never vacationing in Alaska but is seriously ill and wants to be married before she dies — which brings everyone back home for one last wedding. The emotional arc finishes on a tone of fragile hope rather than cinematic resolution, and I loved how Hartnett chose compassion and connection over a tidy happy ending.

The ending of this book went to be a long, slow breath of relief after holding my breath for 400 odd pages, to discover that Annabella's monstrous mother got none! The frail, defenseless, perfect little doll of Annabella went to America with Manuel, the first person to ever look at her and see a real human being, rather than a broken thing. This must be so for Annabella, the root-less, fortune-less orphan, to find her freedom in a blank-slate of a country, where the culinary delights of her fore-bears were of no interest whatsoever. Cookson always wrote about the strict, merciless class boundaries of the North of England, and it would have been completely against the spirit of all of her other works to have her characters earn their peaceful existence in some richly-endowed, mediaeval castle, complete with servants and a coat of arms, after having to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of their hard-won existence. They look forward, not back!

The ending of 'Wakefield' always leaves me with this eerie, unresolved feeling—like stepping off a curb and realizing there's no ground. The short story by E.L. Doctorow (based on Hawthorne's original) follows Howard Wakefield, a man who, on a whim, hides in his attic for months, watching his family grieve his disappearance. The brilliance is in the ambiguity: he never explains why he does it. One day, he just... steps back into his life, as if nothing happened. The family barely reacts. It's like a dark joke about how replaceable we all are. What haunts me is the lack of closure. Did he learn anything? Was it a midlife crisis gone surreal? The story mirrors those moments when we fantasize about vanishing—but Wakefield actually does it, and the world moves on without him. It's not about the 'why,' but the 'what now?' That final image of him slipping back into his house, unremarked upon, sticks with me for days. Makes you wonder how thin the line is between being seen and being a ghost in your own life.

That was a lot of in-depth analysis. Some endings are just that – she goes to the bar and gets murdered. The end. There’s no need for every book to be a five-page thesis.