The Applicant

“The Applicant” makes heavy use of repetition with words and phrases. The repetition serves several purposes throughout the poem, depending on where Plath uses it.

The first purpose of the repetition is to provide a strong voice to the speaker. The speaker is a pushy salesperson, and his language reflects that. He constantly repeats rhetorical questions (Lines 1, 6, 7, 10, 14, 22, 29). The use of rhetorical questions is a common sales tactic. The point of a rhetorical question is to prove a point by asking a question that the audience knows the answer to. For example, in Line 29, after having the wife emerge from the closet naked, the speaker asks, “Well, what do you think of that?” The speaker has just spent the first half of the poem setting up the applicant’s need for a wife, and then he provides him with the exact thing he says the applicant needs. The question, then, is not meant to be answered but to serve as a confirmation of the applicant’s internal thoughts upon seeing the “thing” (Line 7) the speaker has just told him that he lacks and needs.