One of the first observations one might make about The Bell Jar is that it is a book filled with fears about death. Even the bell jar itself is a suffocating tomb, an airless place where the soul dies, if not the body. Consider the first page of the book with its reference to the execution of the Rosenbergs and the speaker's inability to get a cadaver's head out of her mind — all these images and ideas point to what is perhaps the main preoccupation in the book: death.
When Esther wants Buddy Willard to show her "some really interesting hospital sights," this excursion includes a look at four cadavers and a number of glass bottles filled with dead babies. Esther is proud of how calm she is when observing these "gruesome things." She even nonchalantly leans her elbow on Buddy's cadaver while he dissects it. Later, watching a baby being born does not give Esther any sense of birth and life. She describes the baby as looking like a blue plum and is bothered by the fact that the mother is drugged into some, supposedly, painless state of oblivion.
Thus it is not really strange, thematically, that Plath's book soon starts to center on Esther's thoughts of suicide, on thoughts of death, for death-like images take precedence early in the book's plot, and they have been foremost in Esther's mind all along. Even when Buddy undresses before Esther, she tells him that she's only seen nude men as statues in museums, and her reaction to Buddy's genitals is that they look like "turkey necks and turkey gizzards"; this is humorous, but it reminds us that Plath has picked a death metaphor again, for she sees Buddy's life-giving genitals as being similar to pieces of dead, gutted birds.
