Life is full of an endless amount of beautiful encounters for every character in Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, with the exception of Esther. She suffers from a serious and complex mental illness which has had a significant impact on her life. Although it is clear that Esther suffers heavily from depression in the novel, Sylvia Plath chooses to recount her life abstractly through countless symbols and ironies to prove that Esther is completely depressed. Everything Esther sees is through the prism of depression, which alters her outlook on life. An irony that runs throughout the novel is the fact that Esther works in a prestigious fashion world, and yet she sees everything in a horrible and cynical way. It is also according to the Down article that Esther reads a poem about the life of a fig tree, which includes details about the love and prosperous life of the tree, as well as the heavenly life of the characters in the poem . Once he finishes reading, his thoughts turn to comparing the fig tree to his own life. She describes the aspect of having a husband and children as one figure, and her favorite editor on another and so on. However, later in the story, Esther describes these figs: “…they began to wrinkle and turn black, and, one by one, they fell to the ground at my feet” (Plath 77). Once she realizes that none of these aspects will ever be a part of her life, because of her depression, she loses more and more hope, the little hope she had before. Not only did the loss of hope in love and his passion for writing, but also his hope in his own life last longer. The fig tree is a very well-known section of the novel, and as noted in the article The Feeding of a Young Woman by Caroline Smith, "...this passage is a metaphor for Esther's psychological deterioration..." The fig tree is an important turning point. point for Esther, as she comes to accept her depression, which now leads her to view the world solely through the lenses of depression. From that moment on, everything Esther sees becomes more and more hellish and