Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" features a speaker describing her attempts to deal with the death of her over a period of time. His death still weighs heavy on her mind and makes it impossible for her to live her life, which is why the speaker uses the imagery of her father being a Nazi and herself being a Jew shipped off to a concentration camp. Like those in the concentration camps, the speaker found it impossible for her to live her life with the grief from her father's memory constantly living in her mind, so she was forced to thing about him less by thinking about him less: "Daddy, I have had to kill you."
Having her dad move from God to a Nazi shows that the speaker is attempting to think about her dad less by lowering or even defaming his memory. God is a figure that gives life and watches over it, whereas Nazis are those who would claim rights to others' lives, oppress them, and sometimes take them, such as the memory of her father has now done.
Eventually she compares her father to a vampire, a dead but still frightful figure. The grief from the speaker's father's death saps the life from her life a vampire sucks blood, so therefore she must kill it.
This is a very insightful post from Ryan, bringing attention to an aspect of "Daddy" that I had not considered before. Ryan seems to be saying that the speaker must defame her father's memory as a means to deal with the grief of losing him at a young age. However, I think the post overlooks the fact that "daddy" himself may be to blame for the dismal comparisons that the speaker uses. Perhaps it is not merely the grief of losing him, but also his treatment of the speaker that makes her memory of him extremely negative. That would provide an equally believable explanation for the speaker's Nazi imagery.
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