We begin to wonder if Esther takes up mental illness partly because it is available to her and trendy. Then she gets caught in her game and becomes suicidal because she can't find a place for herself. Her narcissism has trapped her. She has pursued success and "happiness" to a dead end. She can't examine the past honestly, and she has no interest in the future. She can't internalize happy associations. She is an individual who is lost, adrift. Every idea for her future, in terms of jobs or roles, seems to be either distasteful to her or impossible to achieve. With that state of mind, expectations have not only dimnished, but disappeared. Death, then, seems the only path, suicide the only role.
And even though Esther survives, as did Plath in her first suicide attempt, Esther is still lost and indecisive at the end of the novel. We can see from such poems as "Lesbos" and "Daddy" that Plath did not find motherhood and marriage to be roles that particularly suited and fulfilled her; in fact, her anger was quite intense because of these roles. These roles were like "institutions" — that is, they restricted and tormented her, just as school, the magazine, and the mental hospital did.
Plath should have made her peace with the institutions of society or else developed ways to avoid them. Unfortunately, she got tangled up in her own narcissism, and even though that may have sparked superlative poetry from her, in the end it was not self-protective. It was ultimately only self-absorbing and self-destructive. Clearly, it was only in poetry and in her own self-tortured darkness that Plath found a place for herself. And that place was not safe — or healthy. In her other social roles, Plath never found real absorption or completion. Initially, she may have felt fulfilled to have her two babies, one a girl and one a boy, but her poetry and The Bell Jar give us too many negative images of the burdens of cleaning up after puking infants to make us believe that this could ever have been an accepted, part-of-motherhood job for Plath.
