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Journalism of Courage
Over 60 years have passed, and yet the haunting allure of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar has not dimmed one bit; if anything, it is seeing a renaissance among the younger generations grappling with the debilitating burden of choice. A passage from the novel, now widely known online as the fig tree metaphor, has become a rallying cry for Millennials and Gen Z, spreading rapidly on social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. It is a symbol of the pervasive crisis of decision-making paralysis in a world saturated with opportunity.
In the modern classic, published in 1963, Plath describes a fig tree whose branches each hold a fig, representing a different possible future: marriage, motherhood, literary success, academic prestige, adventure. As the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, a college student, reflects: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.”
In an age when the world is at our fingertips, for every road taken, there are hundreds of roads not taken. Choosing one future can mean closing the door on a dozen more. In such a case, an abundance of choice that should be liberating, becomes suffocating.
“One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out,” she continues.
The 20s are often framed as a time for making monumental decisions: careers, relationships, where to live. For Gen Z, who face a world overflowing with options, Plath’s metaphor of decision paralysis has struck a deep chord, and has become the symbol of the melancholia of an entire generation. Terrified of making the wrong choice, Greenwood can only sit beneath the tree, unable to act, watching the figs fall: “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.”
As scholar Jane E. Dodge in her thesis, Sylvia Plath’s Fig Tree: Discourse Formation and the Production and Consumption of Women’s Identity (2024) observes, “Plath’s image captures the tension between social norms and individual autonomy, showcasing the complex interplay among the housewife, the woman writer, and the madwoman in Esther’s psyche.”
It’s a motif that echoes across time. As John Ahern says in his analysis of Dante’s fig metaphor: “The young, still ‘fruitless’ Dante risks being shrivelled or damned for sterility… Brunetto’s subtly imperfect trope not only reveals his sin of sexual deviation, but also becomes a trope of a failed conversion. He, not Dante, is the barren, withered ficus.” Plath’s Esther, like Dante’s fig tree, becomes a symbol of existential rot, the fear that in not choosing, one risks becoming nothing at all.
The reflection, written in the context of the 1950s, has found new resonance in an age defined by limitless possibility. Today, people in their 20s and 30s face an unprecedented abundance of options in all walks of life, whether career paths, cities, partners, and lifestyles. “I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Even seemingly trivial decisions such as how to spend a lunch break, which film to watch, what book to read become exhausting. The metaphor extends: the figs multiply, and they rot.
The passage has been circulating widely online for years, often rediscovered and reposted with fervour in bursts. On Reddit, one user, shared: “I found this excerpt from The Bell Jar today and it really nailed how I feel. The indecision makes me feel like the whole world is going by while I sit and ponder which life I want, and with all that wait, the ‘figs’ just rot.”
“I’m so haunted by this concept that I have chosen to believe … in a multiverse that contains an alternate universe where I make the opposite choice. I am probably too risk-averse and too afraid of hating my life to ever have a kid in this universe, but I like to think that in a different universe, I’m happily raising a great kid,” confessed another.
“This quote is another manifestation of the familiar donkey’s paradox. The infiniteness of choices that Indians are experiencing for the first time ever in the history of the times. More so for Gen Z because this is the only time they have seen. Scrolling through these choices endlessly at the fingertips but not quite in one’s grasp,” says Dr Itisha Nagar, a Delhi-based psychologist. “And as the age of the choices passes the realisation that to have the possibility of everything is to have nothing. Everything is special and nothing is special. For Gen Z, it is the experience of the void of hedonism.”
On Instagram, users took to posting their own fig trees, with each fruit bearing a possible identity: bookstore owner, singer, writer, cottage dweller. On social media, the fig tree has become a visual metaphor, a personal inventory of dreams and possibilities.
Compounding this is the social media–fuelled culture of comparison. Curated lives — seamless work–life balance, creative fulfilment, perfectly plated brunches — create a subtle pressure: to do more, choose faster, live fuller. The failure to keep up breeds a quiet sense of inadequacy.
This generation, often accused of indecision or delay, may instead be confronting the profound pressure to live multiple lives in one — to “have it all”. There is a quiet sorrow in realising that to choose one life is to relinquish others. Some doors, once closed, may not open again.
In her 1998 essay, The Mother, the Self, and the Other, scholar Yōko Sakane observes that Esther’s indecision is shaped by her discomfort with traditional femininity and her refusal to identify with the women around her. Citing the fig tree passage, she wrote: “Esther, being an intelligent college student ‘with fifteen years of straight A’s’, could easily choose any of these figs, but she finds herself increasingly incapable of choosing even one. Her sense of loss reveals not only her ‘neurotic’ ambition of ‘wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time’, but also a sense of alienation.”
This tension still haunts young readers today. Nivedita Gupta, Assistant Professor at Amity University, Noida, says: “In 15 years of my teaching career, I have found, especially girls drawn consumingly towards this novel mostly because it resonates deeply with their own sense of alienation. While girls are growing up, they face an enormous weight of expectations not only from the outside world where patriarchal value-systems prevail making it arduous for women to achieve anything, but also from the universe within themselves where their repressed personal desires continue to jostle with the urge to fight or the urge to take flight. The given quote resonates with the (female) readers for the same reason, it articulates women’s desire to be everything at once in a world where they constantly struggle to become something.”
She draws a powerful parallel with Virginia Woolf: “As Virginia Woolf (who shares commonality with Sylvia Plath in the way of how both ended their lives in the crudest manner) also says, ‘I am not one and simple, but complex and many.’ It arrests the unfathomability of women’s comprehensive experience where their femininity and perseverance continue to be celebrated in literature and legend, while their real dreams, desires and ambition remain stifled in a ‘bell jar’ or are left fallen, wrinkled, plopped to the ground at her feet, or someone else’s.”
For many today, the metaphor hits home. As one online collective put it: “We all desire to experience everything. Ironically, we can only afford to pick one to sustain our day-to-day lives… Will [our passions] just wrinkle, go black, and plop to the ground?”
The Bell Jar endures not only for its portrayal of mental illness and feminist unrest, but for its brutally honest confrontation with the paralysis of potential. Plath’s fig tree has become a generational emblem of phantom potentials, grief for roads not taken, uncertainty, longing, and the toll of standing still.
