Painting the Picture of an Absent Father
             The narrators in Cofer's My Father in the Navy: A Childhood Memory and Plath's Daddy are both women who grew up without their fathers. They deal with this unfortunate predicament in two extremely different ways. Both speakers cope with their missing father syndrome by writing about what they can remember about their fathers. Both speakers have colorfully childish images of their dads in their poems, but this doesn't mean that they share similar images. These images contrast from black to white. While both narrators have no control over the situation their fathers have put them in, they both attempt to do something about it, either through prayer or words. Since their fathers aren't there, they both have to draw conclusions about them from what they do know and each has a specific role engraved in her mind of what her father should be.
             The picture of father painted by the speaker in Cofer's poem is unmistakably white and pure. "...the flash of white our father like an angel heralding a new day." Clearly, the narrator is reflecting on her fond memories as an image of her father, she also mentions him in his "white cloth"; the color alone paints a clear picture of the high regard in which she holds her father. Many times, the speaker of Daddy describes her father with the color black. This dark image is reinforced by the context of each example, "...black shoe", "There's a stake in your fat black heart", "...the black man who bit my pretty red heart in two." This color usage is a visual representation of the connotations behind her memories of her father.
             Even though words rarely accomplish tasks by themselves, both speakers attempt to control their fatherless situation by words. In My Father in the Navy: A Childhood Memory, the speaker often prays and even meditates so strongly on her fathers retur...