Lucy: A Novel
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Key Facts
full title · Lucy
author · Jamaica Kincaid
type of work · Novel
genre · Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel); American immigration literature
language · English
time and place written · Late 1980s, New York City
date of first publication · 1990
publisher · Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
narrator · Lucy Josephine Potter narrates Lucy not long after her first year in the United States.
point-of-view · Lucy has a first-person narrator who reflects extensively on her own thoughts and emotions and the characters of those around her while frequently detailing incidents from her past.
tone · Acerbic, cool, reflective, melancholy
tense · Past
setting (time) · Lucy’s first year in the United States
setting (place) · An unnamed North American city much like New York, a vacation area near the Great Lakes, and, through flashbacks, the Caribbean island of Lucy’s youth
protagonist · Lucy
major conflict · Lucy struggles against the deep feelings for her mother and homeland that undermine her quest for a new life in the United States.
rising action · Lucy experiences intense homesickness upon arriving to America, forms a complex mother-daughter-like relationship with Mariah, and witnesses the demise of Lewis and Mariah’s marriage, all of which contribute to her sense that a change of location can’t lift the burdens of her past.
climax · When Lucy learns of her father’s death and her mother’s resulting poverty, she erupts with rage and pain, and her feelings drive her to both confront and break with her past by writing an angry letter to her mother and burning all of her mother’s unopened correspondence.
falling action · Lucy decides to move out of Lewis and Mariah’s apartment in order to pursue the independence she’s craved from youth, and writes a conciliatory letter to her mother that gives a false new address, through which Lucy at once makes peace with and abandons the forces of her childhood.
themes · The cyclical nature of human existence; the difficulty of mother-daughter relationships; the power of circumstance on perception
motifs · The seasons; letters; food
symbols · “The islands”; photographs; daffodils
foreshadowing · Lucy’s notice of the falseness in Mariah and Lewis’s displays of affection to each other; the unopened letters marked “urgent” from Lucy’s mother; Peggy’s anger over Lucy’s affection for Paul
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