The story incorporates Plath's trademark themes of self-examination, a need for escape, stagnation and desolation by chronicling the experiences of an anonymous young woman who has been committed to a psychiatric institution.
The woman speaks of being given insulin. However, it is difficult to trust her account of events. She is in a psychiatric ward and one is not committed merely because she refuses to take her insulin.
No Way Out
The woman is suicidal and is seeking meaning in a world that doesn't seem to have any at all. The routines and rules of the institution are stifling and, to her, annoying and empty. She patronizes the staff by telling them what they want to hear, not what they need to know.
She doesn't sleep and takes her time at dinner to stave off the coming night. Her drawers and closets are locked at lights out -- for her protection. She speaks of sneaking out a scarf and stashing it in her pillowcase. When she tries to strangle herself, her hands become weak and lose their grasp. She becomes frustrated by her body's determination to survive.
Alone
She tries to befriend the other patients, but she is met with accusations and paranoid delusion. Debby, the one patient who appears to be friendly, is merely superficial and haughty underneath her innocent looking facade. The young woman feels that Debby is "in league with all the rest" and won't tell her what everyone else knows -- that she is an outcast and that there is no hope for her.
Nature's Purpose and Meaning
She enjoys spending time in the "walled yard behind the ward, carrying a book of short stories which she did not read because the words were nothing but dead black hieroglyphics that she could not translate to colored pictures anymore." However, she resents nature for its purpose, freedom and beauty.
As she lies in the grass, she says that black flies hover around her. The color black is an important element that is repeated several times in the story. Black is symbolic of suppression, depression and darkness.
The flies taunt and accentuate the suppression she feels being confined to the institution. They are a nuisance. They are annoying, just as the young woman finds the other patients and staff to be annoying in their superficial, patronizing ways.
As annoying, and yet fascinating, as she finds the other patients, she still feels that they are "warm, active and noisy." There is some life to them after all. However, she is "frozen, withdrawn inside herself like a hard, shriveled seed that nothing could awaken." She has abandoned all hope of redemption while in this institution.
She is envious of the "green grasshoppers that sprang about in the long grass at her feet." She envies the purpose that the insects serve. When she caught a black cricket, she recalls that she held it in her hand and hated it. She hated "the small insect because it seemed to have a creative place in the sun while she had none." The young woman feels as though she is a "parasitic gall on the face of the earth."
The Sun as Comfort
The sun is the only element of nature that she doesn't seem to hold much animosity towards. The sun represents all that faith encompasses. The sun symbolizes rebirth, energy, reliance, hope, beauty and warmth. She seeks comfort from knowing that each day she will see the sun. It is something to look forward to. The sun is a stark contrast to the cold, impersonal atmosphere of the institution.
The young woman looks to the sun as a potential Savior. She suggests "[i]f only the sun would stop at the height of its strength and crucify the world, devour it for once and for all with her lying there on her back." But the sun cripples the woman's faith. The sun lets her down when it tilts, weakens and starts its descent to the depths of the horizon.
"Tongues of Stone"
She states that "it was only the sun that talked to her still, for all the people had tongues of stone." Those who surround the young woman are unable to give her any kind of emotional support. She has no friends in this stark, sterile environment. The words that flow from the lips of the staff and patients are empty and overbearing. Their words weigh heavily upon the young woman and keep her stagnant.
Sixty-odd Years or More
The audience knows that there is hope for this young woman. Foreshadowing speaks of how "her body would live on for sixty-odd years or more." However, she is currently without hope.
She considers the crisis to come when she is "trapped for sixty years inside her decaying body, feeling her dead brain folded up like a gray, paralyzed bat in the dark cavern of her living skull."
She knows that if she survives, she may no longer be capable of any kind of rational or creative thought. The rules and routines of the institution (medication(s) and therapy) stifle any kind of independent thought. Such conditioning is something that has become so ingrained in her that it will be difficult to reverse. The uncertainty that she faces is what creates her sense of crisis and fear.
"The Everlasting Rising of the Sun"In the end, it appears she regains her memory. The fog lifts, the darkness "had thinned and now it lived" and the nurse states "'[w]e have been waiting for this a long time.'"
She has a newfound hope in the thinning of the darkness. The audience is told that she lay in bed "listening to the voice of the dawn and felt flare through every fiber of her mind and body the everlasting rising of the sun."
Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000.
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