Daddy Sylvia Plath Analysis

Sylvia Plath was known for not having a good relationship with her father Otto Plath. Otto died when Sylvia was eight years old (“Daddy”). She spent most of her life trying to come to terms with his influence on her life and her work (“Daddy”). The memory of her father haunted her for most of her life. Since she didn’t know much about him, he was a constant search in her mind. The purpose of this paper is to show and explain the idea that “Daddy” is Sylvia Plath’s way of killing the memory of her father.
She starts out in the first line in the first stanza by stating that he does not do anymore. This is just stating that he doesn’t do anything good or anything at all for her, or it could be simply stated he is dead. She, then, states that
She, then, clearly states that she had to kill him. She explains that Otto died before she had time. Time refers to how Otto died before she could really get to know him since she was only eight years old when he died. She takes a complete change of her view on her father by showing her admiration for him. She describes as “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe, Big as a Frisco seal” (“Daddy”). She describes him as marble-heavy which can be explained as describing her overweight Caucasian father. The saying “a bag full of God” properly describes her admiration for him since after all he is her creator in the aspects of her genetics, her writing, and her mental state. She means by the gray toe is referring to the leg of her father that became infected and killed him due to his
The last two words she says in the stanza, “Ach, du.” It’s German and means oh, you. In the fourth and fifth stanza, she describes how his hometown was involved “wars, wars, wars.” She also describes how it has been laid flat by all these wars. She asks her Polack friend for the name of her father’s hometown, but it has “a dozen or two” names. She was never able to find out where it was or what it was called. She was never able to find out his story which would be her way of talking to him.
In the sixth stanza, she describes a place with barb wire where she is surrounded by Germans. In the seventh stanza, she talks about being on a train “shuffling me off like a Jew.” She describes how she is going to a concentration camp by saying “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.” In the seventh stanza, she describes the landscape of Austria in the first two lines, “The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna are not very pure or true” (“Daddy”). She also describes how she has gipsy ancestry which is just a metaphor for how she has a different history then her