Thursday, August 29, 2013

Creep

"But I'm a creep / I'm a weirdo / What the hell am I doing here? / I don't belong here"

- Radiohead, "Creep"


The novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is the story of Esther Greenwood, a young woman who struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts.  Many of the feelings Esther experiences throughout the novel are echoed in these lyrics from the song “Creep” by Radiohead.  Esther, too, feels out of place and "weird".  She first starts noticing these feelings when she is working in New York at a prestigious fashion magazine, and she describes it like this: “I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty…” (Plath 3).  Clearly, Esther feels a disconnect between herself and others.  This is a theme that continues throughout the novel as her depression worsens—she eventually comes to think of herself as existing separately from the rest of the “normal world”, trapped under the imaginary bell jar for which the novel is named.  Indeed, her feelings of strangeness and apartness are mirror images of the feelings expressed in the song.

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