I was supposed to be having the time of my life.

“A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.
Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself.”

These two quotes vividly show how the main character feels throughout the story.

Esther Greenwood, a college student from Massachusetts, travels to New York to work in a famous magazine. She finds herself among a group of talented girls who won a fashion magazine contest by writing essays, stories and poems. All expenses are paid, the sponsors wine and dine them, organize parties and shower the girls with presents.
The rest of the girls seem to come from wealthy families and look absolutely bored and fed up with all that stuff. On the contrary, Esther’s family is rather poor and she had never seen anything like that before. She admits: “Before I came to New York, I had never eaten out in a proper restaurant”. During the luncheon, we can see how greedy she is with food.
Esther feels more and more uncertain both about her own abilities and about the rewards that these abilities have garnered her. She becomes extremely self-critical and doubtful. She starts feeling that she is not talented enough, not bright enough, and that she is simply not enough herself. Esther compares herself with others all the time. Just read this excerpt.

“I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue –… – and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. It mightn't make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.”

All her thoughts about imperfection literally drive her crazy. She is one step away from the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. The fact that she was rejected from a writing course and had to spend the whole summer in her hometown, added up to Esther’s depression and suicidal thoughts.

Also, I found peculiar the way Esther feels about marriage and relations with the opposite sex:

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”
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Personally, I liked Esther. She seems like a girl I could become friends with. In the beginning of the story she strongly reminded me of my eighteen-year-old self somehow: similar thoughts, preoccupations, anxiety, ambitions, extreme self-consciousness, desire to be better, smarter, brighter.

There were 3 times I almost yelled in excitement when I encountered Plath’s thoughts I could totally relate to.

1. “I am not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else”.
2. “The day I went into physics class it was death.” (It was exactly how I felt during my first physics class at school)
3. “These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil. Girls like that make me sick.” (reminded me of all those instagram posh beauties that we see nowadays)

The ending is heart wrenching, dark and paralyzing with sadness.

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“In The Bell Jar, the main character uses the bell jar as the primary metaphor for feelings of confinement and entrapment. She feels that she's stuck in her own head, spinning around the same thoughts of self-doubt and dejection, over and over again, with no hope of escape. But she also uses the bell jar as a metaphor for society at large, for the way that people can be trapped inside stale social conventions and expectations.” (source: sparknotes)