The Bell Jar: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Joan explains how reading about Esther’s presumed suicide in the papers inspired Joan to kill herself too. She’d been having a wretched summer trying to secretary while plagued by bunions, and the doctors she’d seen had been largely unsympathetic, suggesting she treat her suicidal feelings with group therapy. Joan was admitted to the hospital after she’d gone to New York to try to kill herself and failed in the attempt. She gives Esther the newspaper clippings about her disappearance and eventual discovery. Esther at first doesn’t recognize two of the smudgy printed photographs of herself. The last photograph is of her when she was found in the basement, and depicts “a long, limp blanket roll with a featureless cabbage head” being lifted into the back of an ambulance.

Esther’s falls asleep after dinner and wakes up to a loud voice repeatedly shouting “Mrs. Banister!” (Mrs. Bannister is the night nurse.) Esther realizes she is the one shouting and beating her bedpost. Mrs. Bannister runs over and, smiling, tells Esther she’s “had a reaction.” Esther says she feels “funny,” and Mrs. Bannister assures her she’ll “be better now.”

During her next visit to Dr. Nolan’s office, Dr. Nolan brings up the reaction. Esther says she felt better at first after it but doesn’t anymore. Esther still lives in fear that any day, Dr. Nolan might prescribe shock treatments.

Dr. Nolan tells Esther she has good news: Esther won’t be receiving any more visitors. Esther is surprised and delighted. She’s thinks about how she’s suffered an endless stream of visitors since arriving, everyone from her former employer to her former English teacher to Philomena Guinea to a Unitarian minister to her mother. Esther has despised these visits, “feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be.”

Esther thinks about how most of the visitors have been nervous around her and have tried to dispense advice. Her aggrieved mother keeps asking Esther “to tell her what she had done wrong” and says the doctors keep asking her about Esther’s toilet training (which had been painless). That afternoon, her mother had brought her roses for her birthday. Esther had dumped the roses in the trashcan. Esther tells Dr. Nolan that she hates her mother. Dr. Nolan smiles “as if something had pleased her very, very much, and [says], ‘I suppose you do.’”