Plath's immersion in thoughts of death pervades the book, and, indeed, there is a great deal of death in all of Plath's work. Likewise, Esther's anxiety about death takes precedence over all other of her anxieties about life. Esther, in fact, is so stricken with fear that she often can have no reaction at all to things that happen — except to lie. For example, when Buddy asks her how she liked watching the birth of the baby, she hedges, "Wonderful, I could see something like that every day." Yet she is, in reality, quite overcome by the "awful ordeal" that the woman must go through. And she is angered by the attitudes of the male doctors. Yet she expresses none of this, even to Buddy. Her fears and anxieties keep her from even expressing her own honest emotions. She buries those too, and thus with her lack of courage, she leads herself straight to depression.
The fear of death is the backside of the fear of life. And Esther, like a child, is fearful of life. By not expressing this and giving vent to her feelings, in some attempt to declare the validity of her reality, her life, she is thrust back to her fears and then to the ultimate fear: fear of dying.
This is more than merely a fear of death, or a fear of life. This is more than anxiety or depression. This is some kind of love for, or addiction for, one's own end. Perhaps this is truly the death instinct. And even though we might say that everyone has this and that anyone might succumb to it, given the right set of circumstances, some people — for example, Plath — have this instinct pervasively and continuously, and rarely does the life instinct overpower it.
In Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, the author talks about transference and how people need this in order to attempt to make themselves whole from their fears and anxieties. However, transference is a distortion of reality. "But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature."
