... I was doing in New York." The speaker will tell us in the next few sentences that she is "stupid" and that she feels "sick," and that she is preoccupied with death. Like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, this young, college age, girl-woman is experiencing an adolescent crisis. When Esther Greenwood tells us in the first sentence that this is "the summer they electrocuted the Rosenberg's," we get a picture not only of that summer's being nauseating, sultry, and death-oriented, but that this young girl's attitudes and life experiences are also this way. The task given to the reader is to try to figure out why Esther is so filled with conflict, so alienated. She herself says, "I was supposed to be having the time of my life." So why is she so miserable with her success? Why does she feel the need to invent another name for ...

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