You wake up one day and come to the realization that you are positively and absolutely mad. You're off your rockers, you've gone bonkers, you're crazy and psycho and insane and you don't seem to care about anything even as a nurse comes in to take care of you. The setting is a room with white walls, drenched with the distinct smell of antibiotics. The halls explode with disorder and the other patients wail for attention; you are in a mental institution, and this is your daily routine. The Bell Jar is a book written by the highly esteemed poet, Sylvia Plath, and it graciously depicts a downward spiral of a beautiful young woman, Esther Greenwood, into the land of dementia. She finds herself brilliantly possessed by what seems to be the symptoms of a mental breakdown, and this trek, as narrated by Ms. Greenwood herself, is written so rationally, so gradually, that the readers won't even notice that she's lost her mind.

"I hadn't washed my hair for three weeks, either. I hadn't slept for seven nights." That was how Esther's twisted road to lunacy started. Her mental instability was horrifically triggered when she spent a whole summer in New York City, interning for a magazine, Ladies' Day. She somehow managed to find herself in a dark state of detachment -- yet, readers were able to wholly grasp the situation and understand exactly what she was going through and the path of her psychotic thoughts. Esther had been just another normal woman until she became uncomfortable with the social norms that are put upon women and how they should act, a problem that actually still stands to be rather common even in modern society.

What really grabbed my interest was not only its amazing storyline but also the fact that it was semi-autobiographical. Plath led a tragic life and if the events in The Bell Jar are parallel to her life, it explains why she chose to die the way she did. On February 11, 1963, Plath stuck her head in the oven and died of intentional carbon monoxide poisoning. Having known these small tidbits of trivia, it left a more haunting ring to the way I read how Esther Greenwood talked and behaved. I felt as though I were moving in the body of the deceased Plath, and I was hardly in control of what would be the next course of action in my life.

Another delicious aspect of this novel that I took the time to savor was the characters and their personalities, their backgrounds, how they chose to act and how Esther interpreted their decisions. Take, for example, Doreen, another intern who works at Ladies Day. She is confident, rebellious, and beautiful, the perfect potion for disaster. However, she wants freedom from the confines of society just as Esther does, and Plath did a magnificent job in constructing another person who Esther could have become instead of the wreck that she turned out to be. Doreen serves as a reminder that life doesn't always work the way it should and there isn't anything to do about that other than grimly accept that, a lesson which was well-relayed throughout the book.

Plath's story is one you will hardly be able to put down. It'll boggle your mind, taking days to fully comprehend the peculiarity of this particular novel. The last page won't feel satisfying and there'll surely be complaints and pleas for more. Esther's quirky and eccentric personality and the people she surrounds herself with will entice the readers, lure them into her trap, and brainwash them until they realize that no one in this world is fully sane. Not even themselves.