So Esther, confused and scared, heroically struggles on, keeps up her grades, tries to be fashionable, and begins to play games. She develops other names for herself, as if that will solve the problems of multiple roles and a fractured identity. She lies to her teachers, her editor, her mother, and to her friends — usually in situations where it is not useful to her, or to the advancement of her career. She lies mostly to play games and to protect herself from conflict. She is deathly afraid of revealing her true identity, or her muddled identity, to anyone. And she is certainly not ready to fight others for it. Because of these fears and conflicts, Esther has no really close friends. None of her friends truly know her, and even if it is true that her mother and her editor and her teachers cannot understand her, Esther certainly doesn't allow them to try.
Esther is desperately in need of help to get herself from adolescence into adulthood; she continually cuts herself off from others and from her own feelings, as well. She is convinced that her father might have helped her, but, she sighs, he died long ago. Thus, she feels all alone, and her world becomes grayer and grayer as she becomes more and more in conflict with herself and depressed about herself. After her stint in New York City, she has a severe mental breakdown, and, eventually, she takes sleeping pills in an almost fatal suicide attempt.
When Esther is institutionalized and treated, she is, of course, not in charge of her own life at all. She feels that she is in a bell jar, stewing in her own foul air. Meanwhile, her mother, and Mrs. Guinea, and even Buddy and some of her girl friends, plus the institutions for mental health and the proverbial wheels of American good will — all these are trying to piece Esther back together again, in their image of what she was or should be. No wonder we are so sympathetic with this bright, sometimes charming, attractive, but victimized young woman.
