Personal Narration In Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy

Although Jamaica Kincaid insists that she “would never write a continuation. It’s a continuation only in the sense that it’s about my life and it’s the same life I’m writing about, but they weren’t meant to be the same person at all” (Vorda 70), her novel Lucy written in 1990, seems to most readers and critics a sequel of Annie John. According to Lisabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Lucy works “well as a continuous narrative with well-articulated plot” (118). Despite the differences in protagonist’s name (Lucy and Annie), age (Lucy is older than adolescence Annie), and locations (United States and Caribbean), Kincaid invites readers back to the significant elements of Annie John’s story, as love-hate relationship between mother and daughter, “relationship

The climactic moment of […] novel comes when Lucy finally “finds her tongue,” writing the text of her own life rather than allowing it to be dictated to her, a process that echoes fictionally what Brönte and Kincaid have done in reality – the former by subverting William Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems too create her own Lucy … (142).

In addition, in Alleyne’s interview, Kincaid reveals that as a child she wanted to be Charlotte Brontë, and she “loved the idea that this woman had written a book” (web). In another interview, she says that her writings did not come from the West Indian anansi tales, but came from English poems and novels: “It would be Charlotte Brontë. It would be English people” (Ferguson169). Kincaid adds that when she started to write, she has never read a West Indian writer and “did not even know there was such a thing” (169). As early mentioned, she had a colonial education; it influenced her writings and reflected in

This day is for Lucy a new one with full of new things and feelings, like her new undergarments “bought for [her] journey” (4), which reminded her of “how uncomfortable the new can make you feel” (4). A small room like “a box in which cargo travelling a long way” (7), a bed which she “slept soundly”, every experience like “the ride in the elevator, being in an apartment, eating day-old food that had been stored in a refrigerator,” and feelings toward them are “all so new” (4). Even the weather or sunshine outside is new for