The Fig Tree Was Never About the Fruit

Picture 1 - A fig tree

Sylvia Plath killed off an entire generation of futures in a single paragraph, and she did it with a fruit. 

The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a nineteen-year-old student with a bright future. She is smart, ambitious, and surrounded by opportunities, but instead of feeling excited about what comes next, she feels overwhelmed by it. 

Esther finds it hard to understand who she wants to be in a world that seems to want her to pick just one thing: a successful woman, a wife, a mother, an artist, or something else entirely. The author captures this feeling in one of the most famous passages in the novel:

“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 [...] 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. 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.”

She cannot choose. So she sits and starves, and every unchosen future dies at her feet while she is still alive to watch it happen. It is one of literature’s most beautiful images of indecision, but I have always wondered if we read it too simply. 

We are told to choose, or we will lose everything, but what if the tragedy was never that Esther could not choose? What if it was that she believed choosing meant losing? Nothing forces us to see the falling figs as the end of every other possibility. We could just decide to reach for one, taste it, and discover what comes next. 

There is something cruel about being young in a world that tells you that you can be anything. We grow up being asked what we want to become before we even know who we are. We are told to dream without limits, and then we are handed thousands of possible lives and asked to pick one.

Choose a university degree.

Choose a career. 

Choose a country.

Choose a person.  

Choose a version of yourself. 

And then live with the knowledge that every choice closes a door.

Perhaps this is why we hesitate. We keep our options open because we are afraid that choosing one life means killing all the others, and we tell ourselves that not deciding is a kind of freedom. We scroll through possibilities, compare ourselves to other people’s lives, and wait for the moment when the right answer becomes obvious. Meanwhile, the tree keeps growing, and the fruit keeps falling.  

Esther is nineteen when she imagines that tree, and what she doesn't know yet is that a career can change, a friendship can come back, and a country can become home and then become somewhere you left behind. Someone can fall in love at twenty, lose it at thirty, and find something completely different at forty. 

Branches get cut, and new ones grow. 

We are not choosing between a hundred lives.  

We are choosing one moment at a time. 

And then perhaps that is much less frightening.

It doesn't mean there is nothing to grieve. There will be figs that we never taste: cities we never live in, people we never meet, languages we never learn, and versions of ourselves we never become. Some of them will hurt to lose, and they should.

Mourning the life we did not choose should not be a failure; it is simply the price of having chosen at all. The problem starts when we mourn lives we haven't even lost yet, and the fear of making the wrong decision becomes an excuse to not decide at all. 

At the end of the novel, after everything she has been through, Esther could imagine being given another chance, being “patched, retreaded, and approved for the road.” If she could picture starting again at her lowest moment, then the rest of us can probably allow ourselves to change directions too. We can leave, come back, and start again. We can even become strangers to the people we once thought we would be.  

I think this is the part of Plath’s metaphor that we sometimes forget: a tree is more than its fruit. It has roots and branches, and it keeps growing. Maybe becoming an adult is learning that choosing a life does not mean choosing it forever. We are allowed to change our minds. We are allowed to discover that the fig we reached for was not the one we wanted. We are allowed to reach for another. 

We should stop being afraid of the figs that fall. Let them fall. Let some lives remain unlived. There will always be another branch, another season, another fig waiting just beyond our reach. 

The tragedy was never the falling fruit; it was believing that once one fell, the tree was empty. 

It isn't, and it never was.