People's lives are shaped by their success and failures in their personal lives, and relationships with each other. The author, Sylvia Plath, expresses this in her novel, "The Bell Jar." She is concerned almost entirely with the education and maturation of Esther Greenwood, the main character of the novel. Plath's novel uses a chronological and necessary periodic structure to keep Esther at the center of all action. Other characters are imperfect and secondary to Esther, and her developing character. They are shown only through their effects on her as a central character.
             Sylvia Plath sets impossibly high goals for herself. "I want, I think, to be omniscient," she wrote. "I think I would like to call myself 'the girl who wanted to be God.' Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be-perhaps I am designed to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it"(King 16). She expressed these feelings at the age of seventeen; surely many naive, intelligent seventeen year olds have expressed similar sentiment. But in Sylvia Plath they signal the perfectionist attitude that drove her to succeed. This attitude insured failure, breeding a kind o destructive energy, which was to become increasingly evident in her writing of the character, Esther Greenwood. Esther Greenwood is a parallel to Sylvia Plath, thus enabling the reader to understand both the character and the author in a humane way.
             The reader tends to sympathize with Esther. We all at one time have felt that we just did not quite fit in. Esther tries to adjust herself to those that surround her by taking in the different personalities, trying to find the right one, that could be hers. If we allow those that surround us to decide who we are we lose the power to define, t judge, and to respect ourselves. Esther is a young woman who has plunged into depression, which has caused her to doubt herself and the world around her. She att...