The Bell Jar | Techniques
An accomplished student and teacher of fiction, Sylvia Plath had at her disposal the full arsenal of literary techniques, and she employs many of them in The Bell Jar. For example, most of the Buddy Willard episodes are recorded in a series of flashbacks, and Plath also uses the technique of "defamiliarization" (so coined by the Soviet critic Shklovsky), by means of which the reader is invited to regard his stale "reality" in fresh and disturbing ways.
However, the novel's most-discussed technique is its "doubling," its use of polarities — like the negative and positive...
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