Esther Greenwood—Buddy Willard

Esther Greenwood—Buddy Willard is a relationship whose final meaning is separation rather than reunion. When Buddy visits Esther at Belsize, she discovers that his presence no longer stirs the feeling she once expected; she can regard his history with her and Joan without making herself, or him, the explanation for Joan’s suicide. Their conversation ends with a firm distinction between Buddy’s past romances and Joan’s decision, marking Esther’s movement away from dependence on him.

Earlier Attachment and Estrangement

The later meeting carries the weight of a relationship formed before Esther’s hospitalization. Buddy had been the man whose confidence once shaped her expectations, but their connection had already become a source of conflict rather than a secure future. By the time she considers seeing him again, Esther imagines the visit not as a return to romance but as a test of whether she can place him in the past. She first thinks it would be awful to have him come to the asylum, suspecting that he might visit to gloat or to associate with the doctors. Then she revises that expectation: letting him come could be a step toward renouncing him, a way of telling him that he was the wrong person and that she had stopped hanging on.

That change in Esther’s anticipation is important because it makes the visit an act of separation before Buddy arrives. She does not describe herself as having a replacement or as possessing a settled new life; she explicitly recognizes that she has nobody. The significance lies instead in her intention to stop organizing her choices around Buddy. The imagined visit becomes a chance to acknowledge the end of that attachment without pretending the loneliness around it has disappeared.

The Visit at Belsize

When Buddy enters Esther’s room, khaki cap in hand, the reunion brings no emotional revival. They exchange greetings and stand looking at one another. Esther waits for a feeling, even a faint glow, but finds only a great, amiable boredom. Buddy seems small and unrelated to her, recalling the figure he had cut against the posts at the bottom of the ski run a year earlier. The memory connects the present encounter to their earlier history while making clear how distant that history now feels to her.

Buddy’s changed appearance is not the only change the visit reveals. He has come in his mother’s car, and Esther’s attention is on the emotional distance between them rather than on the familiar authority he once held. When he raises a question about himself, his old, assured smile has given way to a grave, tentative expression. Esther sees him as a man who often does not get what he wants. Their conversation thus reverses their former imbalance: Buddy seeks an explanation, while Esther is able to listen and answer without treating his uncertainty as a claim on her.

Joan and the Question of Responsibility

Buddy connects his dating history to the suicide attempts of the women he dated: first Joan, then Esther, and then Joan again. The question suggests that he fears there may be something in him that drives women crazy. Esther does not accept that framing. Remembering Doctor Nolan’s response when she had raised Joan’s suicide, she recalls Nolan insisting that nobody else did it for Joan: Joan did it. Nolan had also explained that even psychiatrists have patients who die by suicide, without therefore being responsible for those deaths.

Esther applies that distinction directly to Buddy. She tells him, “You had nothing to do with us,” and, when he asks if she is sure, answers, “Absolutely.” The exchange does not deny that Buddy dated both women, or that the sequence troubles him. Instead, it separates the fact of those relationships from the causes of Joan’s actions. Esther refuses to make Joan’s suicide evidence of Buddy’s power over women, just as she refuses to make it her own responsibility. The answer gives Buddy reassurance, but it also shows Esther speaking from a position no longer governed by her former romantic attachment.

Separation and Narrative Significance

The Belsize meeting confirms the relationship’s changed status through small, concrete signs rather than a dramatic reconciliation or confrontation: the absent glow, Buddy’s tentative face, and Esther’s unequivocal answer. Her earlier thought that the visit might let her renounce him is borne out in practice. She can encounter him, consider his worry, and respond without renewing the bond. The relation ends here not because she claims to have solved her isolation, but because Buddy no longer occupies the place of an indispensable answer to it.

The novel places this personal separation against the wider crisis Esther narrates. Its remembered summer is marked by the Rosenbergs’ execution, news that repeatedly invades Esther’s thoughts and intensifies her sense that something is wrong. The historical pressure does not explain the relationship, but it forms part of the unsettled world in which Esther’s earlier attachments and expectations lose their force. In the later hospital visit, the decisive change is more intimate: Esther can distinguish Buddy from Joan’s death, and can distinguish her own future from a return to him. The relationship’s ending is therefore both a refusal of romantic dependence and a measure of Esther’s newly asserted capacity to interpret the past without assigning Buddy control over her life.