Perhaps it is this fear of the body that causes Esther to be so addicted to thoughts of suicide. For if the body is going to sabotage one, perhaps it would be best, easier to deal with, if one willfully killed the body first. Esther is thus afraid of life and afraid of death, afraid of success and afraid of failure. When these fears give her acute pain, the ideas of death and joining her father in the grave seem to be the best solution.
Being so concerned with issues of freedom and entrapment (the bell jar is, after all, a kind of jail or even a kind of cocoon), Esther quite naturally attempts suicide when she cannot find any way out of her maze of fears and conflicts.
And here the critic must severely chastise the heroine for her lack of courage, her failure to even try very hard at being heroic. This book and its main character are so soaked in narcissism that even when this young girl fails, we are not sure how to react to that because the point of view of the work itself is not clear on some of these issues. In Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the central character, McMurphy, fails to save himself, but he is nevertheless a hero, and we are quite clear about his individuality and where he stands in the battles he's undertaken. Esther keeps ducking her battles, and Plath never, in this work, crystalized what battle might have been worth it — what "figs" Esther might have tried to pick, or how many. So the book ends with a certain scattered quality, a certain flatness, a certain lack of finished thought. Release from the mental hospital is supposed to give Esther's character resolution, but actually, on reviewing the book as a whole, we see that Esther is probably still torn by fragmentation, and that she might even be lost again to depression.
