Later, back at the asylum, Dr. Quinn, Joan's psychiatrist, comes to ask Esther if she knows where Joan might be. Esther thinks about how she wants to disassociate herself from Joan, just as she earlier wanted to disassociate herself from Doreen. Esther tells the doctor that Joan should be in her room at Belsize. As it turns out, Joan has hanged herself in the woods, near a frozen pond.
Chapter 20 begins with a description of the hospital and a description of Massachusetts, "sunk in a marble calm." There has been a fresh blanket of snow, and everything looks deceptively clean. In a week, if Esther passes her interview, she will be released from the hospital and will be transported to college in Mrs. Guinea's large black car. Dr. Nolan has tried to be realistic and warn Esther that people may treat her oddly. Mrs. Greenwood has characteristically brushed off the institutionalization as merely "a bad dream." Plath writes, "To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream." And in spite of all her treatments, Esther says that she remembers everything — cadavers, Doreen, the fig tree, Marco's diamond, the sailor, Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse, the thermometers, "the Negro with his two kinds of beans," the extra pounds from insulin, and "the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull." Esther says that it's all part of her, part of her landscape.
When Buddy Willard comes to visit her, Esther has to shovel his car out of a snowdrift. The sun is starting to come out from behind gray clouds, and we think that Esther may actually be getting well. Buddy reveals his fears to us when he asks Esther if she thinks that he drives women crazy. Since he had also dated Joan, he is worried, but Esther assures him that he had nothing to do with Joan's suicide. He is relieved; he asks Esther with his characteristic insensitivity, who'll marry her now?
In the next scene, Esther calls Irwin to remind him of the emergency room bill that he neglected to pay. When he asks her when she'll see him again, she answers "Never" and hangs up. She says that his voice means nothing to her and now she feels "perfectly free."
