Camus tells us, in The Myth of Sisyphus, that the single most important philosophical dilemma that human beings must face is the issue of whether to choose to end it all. Shakespeare, too, had posed the question in Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. Plath, perhaps the product of an era more inclined toward the "not," died by her own act.
In some ways, we, the readers, are left to judge not only Plath's action, but to evaluate the whole literary and cultural tradition that spawned her. First, there was Eliot's The Waste Land, and then there were several decades during which the best and brightest had only the most depressing things to say about life and the human condition. We were led from Prufrock to Norman Mailer's main character in An American Dream, a novel in which a man stabs his wife. Indeed, students of modern American literature often ask, "When can we read something more cheerful?" Coupled with this philosophical point-of-view was the phenomenon of the stream-of-consciousness narrative, a technique created by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and used extensively by William Faulkner, three of the great writers of this era. It is no small accident that Plath was studying "the double" in Joyce's work as part of her honors program at Smith, for she mentions Joyce often in her journals and in her work.
What is important, for evaluating this whole literary tradition — from Eliot on — and important to a serious discussion of the problem of suicide, is why so many of the bright, young, classical school-of-thought students were more interested in Joyce and Eliot than they were in Woolf and Faulkner. And this is where we must place Plath, for certainly, even if she does not mention Eliot at length, her bell jar image is the direct descendant of his waste land; in relation to our contemporary polluted world, we now get clear air only within a bell dome.
