How do we feel about Holden? (Bear with me, this was written on the 10th of February, but is just now getting posted sorry guys)

He's getting hella desperate. No one wants to give him the time of day it seems, and when he does get to meet up with someone, it doesn't take long for the conversation to turn south. I wish he had more people he could reliably talk to. He seems like a friend at this point, and I just want him to feel like he's got somewhere he's going. Not exactly to college, not exactly to another high school, not exactly to a job, though it might be where he ends up, but at least having some definite goal in the future, or at least know what he's doing. Some people can pull off wandering aimlessly, but Holden Caulfield is not one of these people. It's hurting him and I wish there was a way to tell him that.

3/5

...All I have to say is, I hope someone's telling him this.

Esther's Growth

I think that Esther's definitely grown since the beginning of the book, considering she used to always have her favorite bathtime purification ritual, that allowed her to detox from the evils of the world, and then being able to completely forget about them. It's never healthy at all to just pretend like things never happened, because then you can never learn from them. It's because of this that I see some real growth in Esther towards the end of the book when she kind of totally rejects her mom's thinking about her finally being allowed a chance at leaving the asylum. Her mom tells her that they can finally just put it behind them and never think about it again. But Esther needs those experiences for later on in her life, when the Bell Jar looms over her head again, should that happen. She needs to know that she's felt that way before, and how she felt, and what she did to finally raise it back up again. Because if she forgets about it, or just tries shut it out completely, that will make things so much harder if she starts getting those thoughts again. It'll be the same experience except like starting all over again, instead of having an upper hand, because she won't be thinking about the last time. That's why I'm so glad that she acknowledges those memories as a part of her, because even though she's worried about the Bell Jar enclosing around her again, she has those past memories to rely on.

Buddy's "Pureness" and Esther's grip on (current) reality

I think that the moment when Buddy reveals to her that he's had sex with the waitress, is the moment when she realized the sexual double standard. She then takes it out on buddy specifically, instead of society as a whole. She needs to figure things out for herself, before she can go blaming individuals for hypocrisy, considering it's just the society-they-live-in's fault.

That being said, I really don't think that Buddy's purposefully being a hypocrite (then again, most people that are hypocrites aren't purposefully hypocrites). It's just society saying that it's okay. Like it's okay to give women drugs that make them forget the pain that they have during childbirth, letting them go through it again and again because it "wasn't that bad," under the guise of them "not really being able to feel anything." I thought that that was the most appalling thing I'd ever read. It just really gets to me how bad it used to be in america (all over the world) (and it's still bad now but sooo much better than before). Men and women just cannot be seen as equals for some reason, and it's just sickening, and I really could go on forever about this. I'll just choose to end it with, we've come a long way, and it's still a long way coming.