Daddy By Sylvia Plath

In the poem “daddy by Sylvia Plath, the speaker characterizes her father indirectly by using figures of speech. Sylvia Plath uses a series of changing and evolving metaphors, about the speaker’s father to describe him. I believe that Sylvia is the speaker of the poem.
. The speaker gives an overall impression that her father is oppressive and cruel, although he misses him. Her father’s oppression has lasted even after his death.
The speaker uses the simile, “black shoe In which I have lived like a foot” to describe her oppression. Her father is the black shoe in which she, the foot is trapped in. In this shoe the speaker claimed she was “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.” The speaker uses an allusion of the devil to tell us that her father

was cruel and evil. To compare her father to the devil she says “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot”, because the devil’s symbolic image as cloven hooves as feet. The speaker implies she misses her father by looking for where he's from and by marrying someone like him. Sylvia could not find where her father came from but she was looking for where he’s been. The speaker points out that she “never could tell where you put your foot, your root.” She would not being trying to learn more about her father unless she missed him in some way. The speaker missed her father so much that she married someone like him. She note that “I made a model of you” referring to her husband. Perhaps she thinks of her father as cruel is because he died leaving her to mourn him, his memory oppressing her.
In the poem she relates to her father by being his victim. She compares herself to a jew and her father as a nazi in an extended metaphor. Sylvia states that “I think I may well be a Jew.” She plays the part of a victim and a jew in the lines “Chuffing me off like a Jew A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.” The speaker claims to have “gipsy ancestress”, a“Taroc pack” and “weird luck”, which are all traits of gypsies. The Jews and the gypsy are victims of the Nazi’s when they cleanzed the Reich. The speaker describes her father indirectly as being a nazi by saying he has a “bright blue..Aryan eye” and that he speaks “Luftwaffe ... gobbledygoo.” The speaker uses metonymy by calling her father a Panzer-man instead of calling him a nazi. More directly she calls him a nazi by saying “Every woman adores a Fascist”, the fascist being her father. The man she married that was like her father, she also describes him as a nazi by declaring he was “A man in black with a Meinkampf look.” Using the metaphors of her fathering being a nazi and her being a jew it characterize her relationship as being a victim. Perhaps being a victim of her father because he father died when she was young and she blames him.