Rumination Fugue Publication Rumination Fugue Publication | Seite 88

and recurrence, and prediction of suicidal ideation and low response to medical treatments
(Cruwys 2).
Plath explores the theme of lacking connections for several times in the novel.
Esther describes her feelings at the very start as feeling “very still and very empty, the
way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding
hullabaloo” (Plath 3). She watches the people surrounding her moving faster and faster,
spinning around and around in which she, as the “eye of the tornado” (3), is merely
connected physically, but not mentally. Later when she placed herself alone in the hotel
room in the middle of New York City, the image of aloneness, separation and disconnec-
tion reappears. This idea is reinforced when the object in her room for connection is
described not only as disconnected, but as deserted by life- “The china-white bedside
telephone could have connected me up with things, but there it sat, dumb as a death's
head” (Plath 19).
The distortion of connection for teenagers today happens with the rise of
social-media. Reaching puberty at the rise of social-media, Schrobsdorff noted, today’s
teens have to manage not only school works from the real life, but also their social-media
identities and the overwhelming social issues. Feeling no hard lines between the real
world and on-line illusions, today’s teens experience disconnection from the world they
live in, while feeling hyper-connected in the world of social-media (Schrobsdorff). They
have to constant shift between disconnection and hyper-connection to reality, while
receiving heavy loads of information from both identities. Today’s teens are vulnerable
like what Faith-Ann says, “We're all like little volcanoes. We're getting this constant
pressure, from our phones, from our relationships, from the way things are today”
(Schrobsdorff).
The important question to ask then, is, how can we as teenagers help ourselves and
each other? We first need to understand that we can’t and shouldn’t combat depression
alone. Esther describes her feeling of imagining going for a trip somewhere as, “it
wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat…I would be
sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (Plath 185). Teenagers
have been dealing with their stress all by themselves, sealed in each of their bell jars,
suffocated in their own sour airs. Therefore, one possible solution for teenagers to learn to