The Bell Jar

Esther joins Jody and her boyfriend Mark at the beach. Mark has brought along a friend for Esther, a boy named Cal. Esther can’t tell if her old self would have liked Cal or not. Her mind feels completely empty. Esther and Cal discuss a play in which a mother contemplates killing her son, and Esther asks Cal how he would kill himself if he were going to do it. She is disappointed when he replies that he’d use a gun and thinks it’s typical of a man. Esther enters the water and swims toward a large rock, planning to exhaust herself and drown.

In the morning, she’d tried to hang herself, but there was nothing on the ceiling to hang from so instead she tried to strangle herself with the cord of her mother’s bathrobe. Each time she got the cord tight enough, her hands would slacken; she realized that her body had many ways of saving itself.

Esther realizes that if she swims to the rock her body will again betray her by climbing out of the water, so she tries to drown herself in the middle of the ocean. Again and again, she dives under but floats back up to the surface.