Just Finished Reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I recently read the 1963 novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.  I knew going in that both the author and the main character Esther Greenwood, her early-1950s young college student interning at a New York fashion magazine, had serious issues with depression and attempted suicide...Plath would take her own life soon after the book's initial publication under a pseudonym.  So I wasn't exactly expecting a walk in the garden reading The Bell Jar, but I was still nonetheless enlightened as to how people think in this state of mind.  Esther provides the first person narrative as she goes into clinical, cynical detail describing and evaluating the people around her, including her mother, men, her employer, her best friends...and just about anyone else she runs across.  Coupled with Esther's ceaseless criticisms of others is her increasing compulsion to commit suicide as she mentally rehearses different opportunistic scenarios for the deed. This is a pretty harsh tale as you might imagine, and I couldn't help but make a comparison to the Holden Caulfield protagonist of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, describing a similar social setting also set in the generally same time and place, only from a young man's equally cynical perspective...only Holden wasn't bent on ending it all.  I find in both characters' narration an extreme narcissism, as if everyone else was on trial for them to judge, and both were quick to condemn life in general.  I've been through adolescent depression...although untreated and never even remotely suicidal...and have experienced a similar rush to judgment about others and life.  I think these books expose a kind of thinking that plagues a lot of us, and that when we finally learn to allow ourselves the freedom to be our own individual selves and grant others their right not to be perfect, then some progress can be made for a happier existence.  I read The Bell Jar because it was one of the "great books" featured on a coffee mug I got a few months ago.  Compared to other books displayed on it, I have to admit to being a little disappointed...yet it does effectively get inside the mind of another in a way that few stories have been able to do.  Looking back on what I've written here, I don't want to sound harsh myself looking at Plath and her protagonist Esther...there's clearly a physical component to depression that some people are predisposed to, and which tends to cast great influence on their outlooks and consequential behavior...