The Bell Jar Summary by Chapter | Sylvia Plath
Introduction To The Bell Jar (Chapter-by-Chapter Summary)
The novel follows Esther Greenwood, a brilliant college student from suburban Boston who wins a prestigious internship at a fashion magazine in New York City—only to find herself spiraling into a profound depression that strips away her identity, her ambitions, and ultimately her grip on reality.
Published under a pseudonym in 1963, just weeks before Plath’s own suicide, the novel has become a landmark work of confessional literature and feminist thought.
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Book Structure Overview
Feature Details Total Chapters 20 Parts Linear narrative without formal part divisions Prologue/Epilogue Not present Narrative POV First-person (Esther Greenwood) Key Settings New York City, Boston suburbs, Adirondacks, various psychiatric hospitals
The novel follows a linear trajectory from Esther’s time in New York through her descent into depression, multiple suicide attempts, and eventual recovery in institutional care.
A Similar Summary To Read Next: The Death of Ivan Ilyich Summary: Tolstoy’s Masterpiece on Mortality
The Bell Jar Summary Chapter by Chapter
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This section contains detailed, chapter-by-chapter plot summaries.
Chapter One: The Rosenbergs and the Amazon
During a hot summer in New York, Esther Greenwood is obsessed with the upcoming execution of the Rosenbergs.
Although she has won a prestigious magazine internship, she feels “still and very empty,” unable to enjoy the city’s hullabaloo.
She stays at the Amazon, a hotel for women, and feels out of place among the wealthy, bored girls there. Esther is drawn to Doreen, a cynical, decadent student who mocks their boss, Jay Cee.
While riding in a cab with other girls, Esther and Doreen are approached by Lenny Shepherd, a famous disc jockey.
Esther adopts the pseudonym Elly Higginbottom to distance herself from her real identity. They decide to ditch the planned magazine party to join Lenny for drinks at a dark bar. Esther drinks plain vodka, which makes her feel “powerful and god-like.”
Chapter Two: The Jitterbug and the Hot Bath
The group goes to Lenny’s ranch-style apartment, which is filled with white bearskins and pine paneling.
Lenny plays his own radio broadcasts and begins a wild, jitterbugging dance with Doreen. Esther feels herself shrinking into a “small black dot” as she watches them get increasingly intimate.
The situation turns violent when Doreen bites Lenny’s ear, and he throws her over his shoulder while roaring. Esther flees the apartment and walks forty-eight blocks back to the hotel, feeling used-up and wrinkled.
Depressed by the silence of her room, she takes a hot bath, viewing it as a ritual of purity. She is awakened later by Doreen, who is drunk and vomits outside her door.
Esther makes a silent decision to watch Doreen but remain loyal to the more innocent girls like Betsy.
Chapter Three: Caviar and Confession
Esther attends a lavish banquet hosted by Ladies’ Day magazine, where she gorges herself on caviar and chicken.
She misses Doreen, who has spent the day with Lenny, and feels “unmasked” by her own lack of ambition.
Jay Cee calls Esther into the office to discuss her future, but Esther admits she doesn’t know what she wants to do.
This realization shocks her, as she has spent her whole life winning scholarships and top marks. She reflects on her successful evasion of a chemistry requirement in college.
By a clever manipulation of her Class Dean, she sat through chemistry without receiving credit, spending the time writing poetry instead.
She recalls how her physics professor, Mr. Manzi, was flattered by her apparent interest. Esther realizes she is slowing down and dropping out of the academic race.
Chapter Four: Food Poisoning and Purification
Jay Cee gives Esther a pile of manuscripts to read and advice on learning foreign languages to succeed in publishing. Esther thinks about her mother, who wants her to learn shorthand, a skill Esther finds demeaning.
Later, Esther and the other interns watch a shallow technicolor movie, and she feels physically sick. She and Betsy leave early and realize they both have severe food poisoning from the banquet’s crabmeat.
They spend the afternoon vomiting in the hotel bathrooms until the hotel nurse intervenes. The doctor gives them injections, and Esther sleeps for hours, feeling “purged and holy” upon waking.
Ladies’ Day sends a book of short stories as an apology for the poisoning. Doreen returns to care for Esther, bringing her soup and sharing a laugh over their presents.
Chapter Five: Buddy Willard the Hypocrite
Constantin, a simultaneous interpreter at the UN, calls Esther for a date arranged by Mrs. Willard. Esther reflects on her boyfriend, Buddy Willard, whom she now considers a hypocrite.
She remembers how she adored him for years before he invited her to the Yale Junior Prom. During that weekend, Buddy had been uninspiring and scientific, once telling her a poem was just a “piece of dust.”
They shared a dry, uninspiring kiss behind the chemistry lab in the cold wind. Esther recounts her frustration with Buddy’s constant attempts to explain things to her.
She reveals that she eventually discovered Buddy’s double life during a visit to his medical school. The chapter ends as she prepares to describe the day they saw a baby born.
Chapter Six: The Birth and the Confession
Esther visits Buddy at the hospital, where she observes cadavers and babies pickled in jars. They watch a woman give birth under a drug that creates a twilight sleep.
Esther is horrified by the woman’s pain and the “unhuman whooing noise” she makes. Afterward, Buddy undresses in front of Esther, but the sight makes her feel “very depressed,” reminding her of turkey neck. She asks Buddy if he has had an affair, and he admits to sleeping with a waitress named Gladys.
Esther is furious that he pretended to be pure while judging her own sexiness.
When Buddy is later diagnosed with TB and sent to a sanatorium, Esther feels wonderful relief. She uses his illness as an excuse to avoid dating and pretend she has a broken heart.
Chapter Seven: The Fig Tree and the Failed Seduction
Esther goes on her date with Constantin to the UN, where she feels dreadfully inadequate comparing herself to the interpreters.
She realizes she has no practical skills like cooking or shorthand. She envisions her life as a fig tree, where every fig is a different future she is unable to choose.
During a dinner of Greek wine and herbs, she decides to let Constantin seduce her to even things up with Buddy.
They go to his apartment to listen to balalaika music and look at the river from his balcony. However, after they lie down on the bed together, they both simply fall asleep.
Esther wakes at 3:00 AM and realizes that marriage would mean being a kitchen mat for a man. She decides she wants change and excitement rather than infinite security.
Chapter Eight: Skiing Toward Death
Esther and Mr. Willard drive to the Adirondacks to visit Buddy at his sanatorium.
Buddy has grown fat and convex from the rest cure, which Esther finds unattractive. He proposes marriage, but Esther firmly tells him she is never going to get married.
She calls herself neurotic because she wants mutually exclusive things, like living in both the city and country.
Buddy tries to teach her to ski on Mount Pisgah, despite her having no experience. At the top of the slope, Esther experiences a suicidal impulse and hurtles straight down.
She feels happy as she plummets toward Buddy at the bottom. However, she crashes and breaks her leg in two places. Buddy tells her with a satisfied expression that she will be in a cast for months.
Chapter Nine: The Diamond and the Rooftop
In her final days in New York, Esther’s depression worsens; she cannot stop crying during a magazine photo shoot. Hilda, another intern, tells Esther she is glad the Rosenbergs are going to die.
Esther finds it increasingly difficult to pack her clothes, as they seem to have a mulish identity. She goes on a date with Marco, a woman-hater who gives her a diamond stickpin.
At a country club dance, Marco becomes aggressive and tries to rape her in the mud. Esther fights him off, bloodies his nose, and eventually loses the diamond in the muck.
On her last night, she climbs to the hotel roof and throws her entire wardrobe piece by piece into the night wind. She returns to the hotel in a bathrobe, feeling like she is feeding her past to the city.
Chapter Ten: The Rejection and the Telephone Poles
Esther takes the train back to the suburbs, her face still marked with Marco’s dried blood. Her mother meets her with the news that she was not accepted into the summer writing course.
This rejection shatters Esther’s last hope for the summer, and she feels she has plummeted into a gap. She spends her days in a sulphurous light, unable to sleep or leave her bed.
She watches her neighbor Dodo Conway, whose seventh pregnancy makes Esther feel sick. Esther cancels her other summer school plans and writes a bitter letter to Buddy.
She attempts to write a novel about a heroine named Elaine, but realizes she lacks experience. Her mother tries to teach her shorthand, but the symbols become senseless.
She counts nineteen telephone poles of her life and can see nothing beyond them.
Chapter Eleven: Doctor Gordon and the Common Sailor
Esther’s insomnia becomes absolute; she hasn’t slept for seven nights and stops washing her hair.
Her family doctor, Teresa, refers her to a psychiatrist named Doctor Gordon.
Esther immediately hates him for his conceit and the perfect family photo on his desk.
She lies to him, claiming she is the same, while hiding her deteriorating handwriting. She meets a sailor on the Boston Common and again adopts the name Elly Higginbottom.
She tells the sailor she is a thirty-year-old orphan to explain her awful behavior. Doctor Gordon tells her mother that Esther needs shock treatments.
Esther begins reading scandal sheets and becomes fascinated by news of a suicide on a seven-story ledge. She begins to contemplate different methods of killing herself, specifically disembowelment or jumping.
Chapter Twelve: The Shock Treatment and the Father’s Grave
Esther arrives at Doctor Gordon’s private hospital for her first shock treatment. She is terrified by the other patients, whom she describes as shop dummies. She witnesses a woman struggling and shouting about jumping out of a window.
The shock treatment is a terrible thing—she feels it shake her like the end of the world. Afterward, she feels terrible and realizes she is through with Doctor Gordon.
Back home, she makes a first attempt at suicide by trying to slit her wrists in a warm bath. She finds herself unable to go through with it because her skin looks too white and defenseless.
Instead, she slashes her leg to practice but realizes it is too hard to get at her secret self. She visits her father’s grave for the first time, howling her loss into the rain.
Chapter Thirteen: The Ocean and the Cellar
Esther goes to the beach with her friend Jody and a boy named Cal. She argues with Cal about a play involving a mad person and morphia powders.
She attempts to drown herself in the ocean, but her body spits her back up every time she dives. She takes a volunteer job at a maternity ward but is overwhelmed by the chattering women. She intentionally ruins bouquets of flowers and flees the hospital.
Finally, she decides on a plan: she hides a bottle of pills and a glass of water. She scrawls a note saying she is going for a long walk. She crawls into a dark, narrow bolt hole in her cellar and swallows the fifty pills. The silence of the earth rushes her to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen: The Mirror and the Ward
Esther wakes in complete darkness, feeling like a worm, and is rescued after being missing for days.
She is hospitalized and temporarily blind, but the doctor assures her her sight is intact.
She is loving and reproachful toward her mother and brother when they visit. George Bakewell, a former acquaintance now working as a houseman, visits her to gawk at her. Esther demands a mirror and is horrified to see her head shaved and her face purple and green.
She breaks the mirror and is told she will have seven years’ bad luck. She is moved to a city hospital’s psychiatric ward, where she meets Mrs. Tomolillo.
She tells a group of artificial doctors that she feels lousy. She intentionally kicks a food attendant and breaks thermometers to stay in her room.
Chapter Fifteen: Doctor Nolan and the Mirror Image
Philomena Guinea, the novelist who provided Esther’s scholarship, pays to move her to a private asylum. Esther still feels she is sitting under a bell jar, stewing in her own air.
At the new hospital, she meets Doctor Nolan, a woman psychiatrist she finds stylish and empathetic. Esther is wary of the many male doctors who visit her and give her a history of the hospital.
She meets a patient named Valerie who has had a lobotomy and seems content.
Esther realizes that Joan Gilling has also been admitted to the same asylum. Joan tells Esther she was inspired to run away and attempt suicide after reading about Esther’s disappearance.
Esther is skeptical of Joan’s story but sees the weals on her wrists. She realizes they now share a mirror image of a room.
Chapter Sixteen: Insulin and the Mother
Joan reveals she tried to kill herself in New York by shoving her fists through a window.
Esther undergoes insulin therapy, which makes her grow fatter and fatter. She has a reaction to the insulin and feels briefly light and airy. Doctor Nolan bans Esther’s visitors, which Esther finds wonderful.
Esther finally admits to Doctor Nolan that she hates her mother. Doctor Nolan responds with a smile, saying “I suppose you do,” which Esther finds a relief.
On Esther’s birthday, she dumps her mother’s gift of roses in the wastebasket. She continues her vigil by the bedside of Miss Norris, a speechless patient, hoping for a breakthrough.
Esther learns that Miss Norris is being moved to the worse ward, Wymark. The chapter ends with Joan and Esther living in adjoining rooms.
Chapter Seventeen: Belsize and the Successful Treatment
Esther is moved to Belsize, the final house before discharge, though she feels she isn’t well enough.
She observes the other women, like Mrs. Savage, who seems to be there only because she loused up her daughters’ debutante party. Joan is also in Belsize and seems perfectly at home, which Esther envies. Esther is suddenly scheduled for more shock treatments, but she is terrified of the treachery.
Doctor Nolan promises to be there and that the experience will be like going to sleep. Esther is led through basement tunnels to the Electrotherapy room.
She meets Miss Huey, who treats her with kindness. The treatment is successful; Esther bites down and darkness wipes her out. She wakes up peacefully with Doctor Nolan by her side.
Chapter Eighteen: Freedom and Discovery
Esther feels surprisingly at peace after her shock treatments; the bell jar feels suspended above her head. Joan announces her desire to become a psychiatrist after her release. Esther seeks out a doctor for birth control, viewing the fitting as her freedom from fear.
She feels that being fitted out makes her her own woman. Esther discovers Joan and another patient, DeeDee, in a compromising position in bed.
Joan confesses that she likes Esther better than Buddy, which makes Esther want to puke. Esther tells Joan she doesn’t like her and finds her weird.
She reflects on her attraction to weird old women who want to adopt her. Esther prepares to return to college for the second semester on scholarship.
Chapter Nineteen: Irwin and the Hemorrhage
Esther meets a math professor named Irwin at a library and decides to lose her virginity to him. She wants the experience to be impersonal and priestlike.
The encounter is painful and results in a startlingly bad hemorrhage. Esther bleeds through towels and Irwin’s car seat, realizing she is one in a million to have such a reaction. Joan takes her to the emergency ward, where a doctor finally fixes the bleeding.
Back at the asylum, Doctor Quinn asks Esther if she knows where Joan is. Joan has failed to return from a movie in town. An orderly finds Joan’s body in the woods the next morning.
Joan has hanged herself, and Esther realizes the voice she heard in the night was the wind.
Chapter Twenty: The Board and the Rebirth
Esther prepares for her final interview with the hospital board to be dismissed. She views the past six months as her landscape and realizes her experiences are now part of me.
Buddy Willard visits and asks Esther if there is something in him that drives women crazy. Esther laughs and tells him he had nothing to do with her or Joan’s breakdowns.
She feels absolutely free of him after a final phone call to Irwin. Esther attends Joan’s funeral, wondering what she thought she was burying.
She hears her heart’s old brag: I am, I am, I am. On the day of her dismissal, she dresses in a red suit and polished black shoes. She steps into the boardroom, guided by the eyes of the doctors, to face her future.
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Book Structure Overview
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Total Chapters | 20 |
| Parts | Linear narrative without formal part divisions |
| Prologue/Epilogue | Not present |
| Narrative POV | First-person (Esther Greenwood) |
| Key Settings | New York City, Boston suburbs, Adirondacks, various psychiatric hospitals |
The novel follows a linear trajectory from Esther’s time in New York through her descent into depression, multiple suicide attempts, and eventual recovery in institutional care.
A Similar Summary To Read Next: The Death of Ivan Ilyich Summary: Tolstoy’s Masterpiece on Mortality
The Bell Jar Summary Chapter by Chapter
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This section contains detailed, chapter-by-chapter plot summaries.
Chapter One: The Rosenbergs and the Amazon
During a hot summer in New York, Esther Greenwood is obsessed with the upcoming execution of the Rosenbergs.
Although she has won a prestigious magazine internship, she feels “still and very empty,” unable to enjoy the city’s hullabaloo.
She stays at the Amazon, a hotel for women, and feels out of place among the wealthy, bored girls there. Esther is drawn to Doreen, a cynical, decadent student who mocks their boss, Jay Cee.
While riding in a cab with other girls, Esther and Doreen are approached by Lenny Shepherd, a famous disc jockey.
Esther adopts the pseudonym Elly Higginbottom to distance herself from her real identity. They decide to ditch the planned magazine party to join Lenny for drinks at a dark bar. Esther drinks plain vodka, which makes her feel “powerful and god-like.”
Chapter Two: The Jitterbug and the Hot Bath
The group goes to Lenny’s ranch-style apartment, which is filled with white bearskins and pine paneling.
Lenny plays his own radio broadcasts and begins a wild, jitterbugging dance with Doreen. Esther feels herself shrinking into a “small black dot” as she watches them get increasingly intimate.
The situation turns violent when Doreen bites Lenny’s ear, and he throws her over his shoulder while roaring. Esther flees the apartment and walks forty-eight blocks back to the hotel, feeling used-up and wrinkled.
Depressed by the silence of her room, she takes a hot bath, viewing it as a ritual of purity. She is awakened later by Doreen, who is drunk and vomits outside her door.
Esther makes a silent decision to watch Doreen but remain loyal to the more innocent girls like Betsy.
Chapter Three: Caviar and Confession
Esther attends a lavish banquet hosted by Ladies’ Day magazine, where she gorges herself on caviar and chicken.
She misses Doreen, who has spent the day with Lenny, and feels “unmasked” by her own lack of ambition.
Jay Cee calls Esther into the office to discuss her future, but Esther admits she doesn’t know what she wants to do.
This realization shocks her, as she has spent her whole life winning scholarships and top marks. She reflects on her successful evasion of a chemistry requirement in college.
By a clever manipulation of her Class Dean, she sat through chemistry without receiving credit, spending the time writing poetry instead.
She recalls how her physics professor, Mr. Manzi, was flattered by her apparent interest. Esther realizes she is slowing down and dropping out of the academic race.
Chapter Four: Food Poisoning and Purification
Jay Cee gives Esther a pile of manuscripts to read and advice on learning foreign languages to succeed in publishing. Esther thinks about her mother, who wants her to learn shorthand, a skill Esther finds demeaning.
Later, Esther and the other interns watch a shallow technicolor movie, and she feels physically sick. She and Betsy leave early and realize they both have severe food poisoning from the banquet’s crabmeat.
They spend the afternoon vomiting in the hotel bathrooms until the hotel nurse intervenes. The doctor gives them injections, and Esther sleeps for hours, feeling “purged and holy” upon waking.
Ladies’ Day sends a book of short stories as an apology for the poisoning. Doreen returns to care for Esther, bringing her soup and sharing a laugh over their presents.
Chapter Five: Buddy Willard the Hypocrite
Constantin, a simultaneous interpreter at the UN, calls Esther for a date arranged by Mrs. Willard. Esther reflects on her boyfriend, Buddy Willard, whom she now considers a hypocrite.
She remembers how she adored him for years before he invited her to the Yale Junior Prom. During that weekend, Buddy had been uninspiring and scientific, once telling her a poem was just a “piece of dust.”
They shared a dry, uninspiring kiss behind the chemistry lab in the cold wind. Esther recounts her frustration with Buddy’s constant attempts to explain things to her.
She reveals that she eventually discovered Buddy’s double life during a visit to his medical school. The chapter ends as she prepares to describe the day they saw a baby born.
Chapter Six: The Birth and the Confession
Esther visits Buddy at the hospital, where she observes cadavers and babies pickled in jars. They watch a woman give birth under a drug that creates a twilight sleep.
Esther is horrified by the woman’s pain and the “unhuman whooing noise” she makes. Afterward, Buddy undresses in front of Esther, but the sight makes her feel “very depressed,” reminding her of turkey neck. She asks Buddy if he has had an affair, and he admits to sleeping with a waitress named Gladys.
Esther is furious that he pretended to be pure while judging her own sexiness.
When Buddy is later diagnosed with TB and sent to a sanatorium, Esther feels wonderful relief. She uses his illness as an excuse to avoid dating and pretend she has a broken heart.
Chapter Seven: The Fig Tree and the Failed Seduction
Esther goes on her date with Constantin to the UN, where she feels dreadfully inadequate comparing herself to the interpreters.
She realizes she has no practical skills like cooking or shorthand. She envisions her life as a fig tree, where every fig is a different future she is unable to choose.
During a dinner of Greek wine and herbs, she decides to let Constantin seduce her to even things up with Buddy.
They go to his apartment to listen to balalaika music and look at the river from his balcony. However, after they lie down on the bed together, they both simply fall asleep.
Esther wakes at 3:00 AM and realizes that marriage would mean being a kitchen mat for a man. She decides she wants change and excitement rather than infinite security.
Chapter Eight: Skiing Toward Death
Esther and Mr. Willard drive to the Adirondacks to visit Buddy at his sanatorium.
Buddy has grown fat and convex from the rest cure, which Esther finds unattractive. He proposes marriage, but Esther firmly tells him she is never going to get married.
She calls herself neurotic because she wants mutually exclusive things, like living in both the city and country.
Buddy tries to teach her to ski on Mount Pisgah, despite her having no experience. At the top of the slope, Esther experiences a suicidal impulse and hurtles straight down.
She feels happy as she plummets toward Buddy at the bottom. However, she crashes and breaks her leg in two places. Buddy tells her with a satisfied expression that she will be in a cast for months.
Chapter Nine: The Diamond and the Rooftop
In her final days in New York, Esther’s depression worsens; she cannot stop crying during a magazine photo shoot. Hilda, another intern, tells Esther she is glad the Rosenbergs are going to die.
Esther finds it increasingly difficult to pack her clothes, as they seem to have a mulish identity. She goes on a date with Marco, a woman-hater who gives her a diamond stickpin.
At a country club dance, Marco becomes aggressive and tries to rape her in the mud. Esther fights him off, bloodies his nose, and eventually loses the diamond in the muck.
On her last night, she climbs to the hotel roof and throws her entire wardrobe piece by piece into the night wind. She returns to the hotel in a bathrobe, feeling like she is feeding her past to the city.
Chapter Ten: The Rejection and the Telephone Poles
Esther takes the train back to the suburbs, her face still marked with Marco’s dried blood. Her mother meets her with the news that she was not accepted into the summer writing course.
This rejection shatters Esther’s last hope for the summer, and she feels she has plummeted into a gap. She spends her days in a sulphurous light, unable to sleep or leave her bed.
She watches her neighbor Dodo Conway, whose seventh pregnancy makes Esther feel sick. Esther cancels her other summer school plans and writes a bitter letter to Buddy.
She attempts to write a novel about a heroine named Elaine, but realizes she lacks experience. Her mother tries to teach her shorthand, but the symbols become senseless.
She counts nineteen telephone poles of her life and can see nothing beyond them.
Chapter Eleven: Doctor Gordon and the Common Sailor
Esther’s insomnia becomes absolute; she hasn’t slept for seven nights and stops washing her hair.
Her family doctor, Teresa, refers her to a psychiatrist named Doctor Gordon.
Esther immediately hates him for his conceit and the perfect family photo on his desk.
She lies to him, claiming she is the same, while hiding her deteriorating handwriting. She meets a sailor on the Boston Common and again adopts the name Elly Higginbottom.
She tells the sailor she is a thirty-year-old orphan to explain her awful behavior. Doctor Gordon tells her mother that Esther needs shock treatments.
Esther begins reading scandal sheets and becomes fascinated by news of a suicide on a seven-story ledge. She begins to contemplate different methods of killing herself, specifically disembowelment or jumping.
Chapter Twelve: The Shock Treatment and the Father’s Grave
Esther arrives at Doctor Gordon’s private hospital for her first shock treatment. She is terrified by the other patients, whom she describes as shop dummies. She witnesses a woman struggling and shouting about jumping out of a window.
The shock treatment is a terrible thing—she feels it shake her like the end of the world. Afterward, she feels terrible and realizes she is through with Doctor Gordon.
Back home, she makes a first attempt at suicide by trying to slit her wrists in a warm bath. She finds herself unable to go through with it because her skin looks too white and defenseless.
Instead, she slashes her leg to practice but realizes it is too hard to get at her secret self. She visits her father’s grave for the first time, howling her loss into the rain.
Chapter Thirteen: The Ocean and the Cellar
Esther goes to the beach with her friend Jody and a boy named Cal. She argues with Cal about a play involving a mad person and morphia powders.
She attempts to drown herself in the ocean, but her body spits her back up every time she dives. She takes a volunteer job at a maternity ward but is overwhelmed by the chattering women. She intentionally ruins bouquets of flowers and flees the hospital.
Finally, she decides on a plan: she hides a bottle of pills and a glass of water. She scrawls a note saying she is going for a long walk. She crawls into a dark, narrow bolt hole in her cellar and swallows the fifty pills. The silence of the earth rushes her to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen: The Mirror and the Ward
Esther wakes in complete darkness, feeling like a worm, and is rescued after being missing for days.
She is hospitalized and temporarily blind, but the doctor assures her her sight is intact.
She is loving and reproachful toward her mother and brother when they visit. George Bakewell, a former acquaintance now working as a houseman, visits her to gawk at her. Esther demands a mirror and is horrified to see her head shaved and her face purple and green.
She breaks the mirror and is told she will have seven years’ bad luck. She is moved to a city hospital’s psychiatric ward, where she meets Mrs. Tomolillo.
She tells a group of artificial doctors that she feels lousy. She intentionally kicks a food attendant and breaks thermometers to stay in her room.
Chapter Fifteen: Doctor Nolan and the Mirror Image
Philomena Guinea, the novelist who provided Esther’s scholarship, pays to move her to a private asylum. Esther still feels she is sitting under a bell jar, stewing in her own air.
At the new hospital, she meets Doctor Nolan, a woman psychiatrist she finds stylish and empathetic. Esther is wary of the many male doctors who visit her and give her a history of the hospital.
She meets a patient named Valerie who has had a lobotomy and seems content.
Esther realizes that Joan Gilling has also been admitted to the same asylum. Joan tells Esther she was inspired to run away and attempt suicide after reading about Esther’s disappearance.
Esther is skeptical of Joan’s story but sees the weals on her wrists. She realizes they now share a mirror image of a room.
Chapter Sixteen: Insulin and the Mother
Joan reveals she tried to kill herself in New York by shoving her fists through a window.
Esther undergoes insulin therapy, which makes her grow fatter and fatter. She has a reaction to the insulin and feels briefly light and airy. Doctor Nolan bans Esther’s visitors, which Esther finds wonderful.
Esther finally admits to Doctor Nolan that she hates her mother. Doctor Nolan responds with a smile, saying “I suppose you do,” which Esther finds a relief.
On Esther’s birthday, she dumps her mother’s gift of roses in the wastebasket. She continues her vigil by the bedside of Miss Norris, a speechless patient, hoping for a breakthrough.
Esther learns that Miss Norris is being moved to the worse ward, Wymark. The chapter ends with Joan and Esther living in adjoining rooms.
Chapter Seventeen: Belsize and the Successful Treatment
Esther is moved to Belsize, the final house before discharge, though she feels she isn’t well enough.
She observes the other women, like Mrs. Savage, who seems to be there only because she loused up her daughters’ debutante party. Joan is also in Belsize and seems perfectly at home, which Esther envies. Esther is suddenly scheduled for more shock treatments, but she is terrified of the treachery.
Doctor Nolan promises to be there and that the experience will be like going to sleep. Esther is led through basement tunnels to the Electrotherapy room.
She meets Miss Huey, who treats her with kindness. The treatment is successful; Esther bites down and darkness wipes her out. She wakes up peacefully with Doctor Nolan by her side.
Chapter Eighteen: Freedom and Discovery
Esther feels surprisingly at peace after her shock treatments; the bell jar feels suspended above her head. Joan announces her desire to become a psychiatrist after her release. Esther seeks out a doctor for birth control, viewing the fitting as her freedom from fear.
She feels that being fitted out makes her her own woman. Esther discovers Joan and another patient, DeeDee, in a compromising position in bed.
Joan confesses that she likes Esther better than Buddy, which makes Esther want to puke. Esther tells Joan she doesn’t like her and finds her weird.
She reflects on her attraction to weird old women who want to adopt her. Esther prepares to return to college for the second semester on scholarship.
Chapter Nineteen: Irwin and the Hemorrhage
Esther meets a math professor named Irwin at a library and decides to lose her virginity to him. She wants the experience to be impersonal and priestlike.
The encounter is painful and results in a startlingly bad hemorrhage. Esther bleeds through towels and Irwin’s car seat, realizing she is one in a million to have such a reaction. Joan takes her to the emergency ward, where a doctor finally fixes the bleeding.
Back at the asylum, Doctor Quinn asks Esther if she knows where Joan is. Joan has failed to return from a movie in town. An orderly finds Joan’s body in the woods the next morning.
Joan has hanged herself, and Esther realizes the voice she heard in the night was the wind.
Chapter Twenty: The Board and the Rebirth
Esther prepares for her final interview with the hospital board to be dismissed. She views the past six months as her landscape and realizes her experiences are now part of me.
Buddy Willard visits and asks Esther if there is something in him that drives women crazy. Esther laughs and tells him he had nothing to do with her or Joan’s breakdowns.
She feels absolutely free of him after a final phone call to Irwin. Esther attends Joan’s funeral, wondering what she thought she was burying.
She hears her heart’s old brag: I am, I am, I am. On the day of her dismissal, she dresses in a red suit and polished black shoes. She steps into the boardroom, guided by the eyes of the doctors, to face her future.
You’ll Love This Summary: Hunger Summary: A Descent into Madness & Genius
