All posts from here on will be for Coming of Age Novel

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Is the Bell Jar Really Gone?

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    One of the more important questions that the ending of the The Bell Jar  leaves unanswered is to what extent the bell jar Esther felt trapped by is really gone. Esther herself even acknowledges this, "How did I know that someday … the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" (Plath, 241). It's unclear to if it's even entirely gone by this point, and it's possible it could just be replaced by another one. Esther also mentions on page 238 that the other girls at college were under a different kind of bell jar. Esther's college experience has been one where she felt very trapped by the pressure on her to succeed and to have a plan for her future, so in that way the entire academic world has been somewhat of a bell jar for her. However, she seems to be more or less back to her old self by the end of the book, but with a different outlook on the world.     Adding to the fear of the bell jar is Buddy's comment about who Esther wo...
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The BB Guns In Gangsters

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     Throughout the chapter Gangsters in Sag Harbor  the entire "gang" becomes more or less intoxicated with the BB guns, and the whole chapter revolves around them and the eventual fight. There seems to be a number of reasons why Benji ultimately gets shot in the eye and why the guns are so appealing to them however, ihe first of which being American gun culture in general. I'm pretty sure this wasn't as much of a social issue in the 1980's as it is today but it feels like an important background factor for all of this. They all succumb to it too, even though Benji brushes it off at first thinking that guns were below them (pg. 151). On page 157 when he actually shoots one of them he admits that it was fun though the satisfaction was more from finding another way to spend their time.     The constant use of gendered language in "Gangsters" also seems to contribute to their obsession with the BB guns. There's his reference to "the Man Isle"...
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The Role of Secrets in Disco

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    Throughout the chapter Disco Jason and other people in his life start to reveal a lot of secrets that have been building and weighing on him over the course of the book. He starts by revealing how Neal Brose has been extorting him for "popularity lessons", then later he finally tells Michael about the broken watch, and Michael tells Jason about the divorce (Mitchell 260; 277-278). There's also the lesson from Miss Lippetts about secrets, which may have been part of the reason he finally talked about the watch, and it also one of the few times Jason has said anything in class. It seems like that made Jason start to reconsider the secrets he had been keeping after seeing it in a classroom setting, though by that point he had already started to throw out a lot of already arbitrary rules. The one secret that he doesn't tell anyone in this chapter is his connection to what happened to Ross Wilcox, which may have been more so because he didn't think he needed to do ...
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