Life is filled with endless amounts of beautiful encounters for every character in the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, with the exception of Esther. He suffers from a serious and complex mental illness that has a major impact on his life. Although it is clear in the novel that Esther suffers greatly from depression, Sylvia Plath chooses to narrate her life in an abstract manner through countless symbols and ironies to demonstrate that Esther's depression consumes her completely. Everything Esther sees is through the lens of depression, which alters her outlook on life. An irony that runs through the entire novel is the fact that Esther works in a prestigious fashion world, yet sees everything in a gruesome and cynical way. This is also according to the article Down aEsther reads a poem about the life of a fig tree, which includes details about the love and prosperous life of the tree, and the heavenly life of the characters in the poem. Once he finishes reading, his thoughts turn to the comparison between the fig tree and his own life. She describes having a husband and kids as cool, and her favorite publisher as cool, and so on. However, later in the story Esther describes these figs: “…they began to shrivel and blacken, and, one by one, they fell to the ground at my feet” (Plath 77). Once she realized that none of these aspects would ever be part of her life, due to her depression, she loses more and more hope, starting from the little hope she had before. Not only the loss of hope in the love and passion for writing, but also the hope for one's own life no longer lasted. The fig tree is a well-known section of the novel and, as stated in the article The Feeding of a Young Women by Caroline Smith, "...this passage is a metaphor for Esther's psychological deterioration..." The tree of fig is an important turning point for Esther, as she comes to accept her depression which now leads her to view the world only through the lens of depression. From that moment on, everything Esther sees is increasingly hellish and...