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“Buddy Willard went to Yale, but now I thought of it, what was wrong with him was that he was stupid. Oh, he'd managed to get good marks all right, and to have an affair with some awful waitress on the Cape by the name of Gladys, but he didn't have one speck of intuition.”
This is the first description that the reader gets of Buddy Willard. Here, Esther boils all of Buddy’s faults down to a single issue: he is unintelligent. He has a superficial intellect that allows him to get good grades and charm other unintelligent people but he is lacking in any real substance. It is instantly clear why Buddy and Esther are incompatible—Buddy is bland and lacks depth, whereas Esther is clever and thoughtful.
“Well, I had just decided to ditch Buddy Willard for once and for all, not because he'd slept with that waitress but because he didn't have the honest guts to admit it straight off to everybody and face up to it as part of his character.”
Esther is furious with Buddy after he tells her that he had a summer-long affair with a waitress. Buddy’s affair enrages Esther because, ever since they first started dating, he has been presenting himself as a sweet, virginal, ideal young man. Esther feels that Buddy is a hypocrite who lied to her about his true nature. Furthermore, while it is not explicitly stated here, Esther is clearly angry about society’s unfair double standards, which allow men to sleep around while encouraging women to remain pure and virginal until they are married.
“Buddy had never skied before either, but he said that the elementary principles were quite simple, and as he'd often watched the ski instructors and their pupils he could teach me all I'd need to know.”
Here, Esther recalls how Buddy insisted on teaching Esther how to ski even though he had never skied before himself. The above interaction recalls the moment at the start of the text when Buddy tried to explain poetry to Esther, an English major and a lover of poetry. Both of these interactions characterize Buddy as an arrogant, patronizing man with an inflated sense of his own intelligence and his own abilities.
“Do you think there's something in me that drives women crazy?”
Buddy asks Esther this question when he comes to visit her while she is residing in Belsize. Here, he asks Esther if it is his fault that two of the women that he dated needed to be institutionalized for mental illness. This interaction might be compared to the moment towards the middle of the novel in which Mrs. Greenwood is upset because she thinks that Esther’s breakdown was her fault, a result of her not raising her daughter correctly. Plath is critical of people like Buddy and Mrs. Greenwood who make a loved one’s diagnosis all about themselves, and this moment captures Buddy’s inflated ego and propensity to center himself at all times.
