![]() ![]() For example, one should know that Plath is best recognized for her poetry and also that she committed suicide when she was thirty. ![]() So if The Bell Jar is fiction of questionable quality or even, questionably, fiction, how does one label the book? First, the reader should have some idea about the life of the author, Sylvia Plath. This work, in fact, is a good example of what John Barth says of most contemporary women's fiction: "secular news reports." Good social commentary or good narrative description of a problem is not necessarily art. Hailed as an important literary work because it takes a liberated view of the plight of the modern American woman is not justification for calling this book a great, or even a good, work of art. Nevertheless, one might argue that the flatness of all the minor characters, plus the inability of the major character, Esther Greenwood, to come to any real dramatic resolution of her problems makes the work a second-rate piece of fiction - if indeed this is fiction at all. Is this book really a novel? It is presented in the form of a long fictional work. The first critical issue to confront the reader of The Bell Jar is the problem of classifying the book. ![]()
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