Pretty dresses and a hint of blood.

Plath’s chief concern seems to be conveying this character at the core of her writing. From the moment she decides to write in the first person, she puts us in the head of this girl, and we as readers get to see the world through her eyes. It is through her descriptions of the world, through the things she takes note on and those she disregards that we understand who she is. Unlike Nabokov’s first person narrative, this character does not engulf herself with her thoughts, she does not dwell page after page on what she thinks abut what she’s thinking, in fact, it tends to be the oppose.
This character seems to avoid painful self-awareness and instead lays her eyes on images.
The description of such images, and their subjects add to the childlike quality of the character. Her skirt is like a lampshade, her sleeves like floppy angel wings. All girly, decidedly innocent metaphors to describe her clothes. She’s astute in her descriptions. Plath wants to convey a certain naiveté without ever mistaking it for silliness, for even if she describes cars as being “glove gray” she can still think of herself “negotiating” her way through an aisle.
We see her avoiding painful thoughts when she hastily mentions people looking at her, before she goes on to wonder why on earth people care about the blood in her face. Plath eases the disturbing into the innocence with an ease that hints the character wishes to undermined it, as if saying “I have blood in my face, what’s the big deal?”
The way she drops the uneasy in between the playful description lets us know of the character bias. There are things she wont dwell on, thus we won’t see them. Instead, look at the trees outside the window.
Her innocence is emphasized over and over again, without getting tiresome, for it’s a well-crafted tone that guides us through the writing.
“The motherly breaths of the suburbs enfolded me.” This character is young in more ways than one.
“It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.” The eagerness of the sentence via the repetition of “and”, plus the elements of the list (particularly the placement of dogs and babies in the end) serve to emphasize who this character is.
Also, it continues to hammer the way she thinks, which she would describe as “hotchpotch”, “baring no relation to another.” Plath describes one thing while actually referring to another in that first paragraph. The jumpy, scattering she mentions in that first paragraph sets the tone for the character’s stream of consciousness, when she jumps from not wanting her mother to see her pain to how clean and slippery the upholstery is.