SOURCE: “The Broken Clock: Time, Identity, and Autobiography in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy,” in CLA Journal, Vol. XL, No. 1, September, 1996, pp. 90–103.

In the following essay, Chick discusses the inescapable burden of the past in Lucy, and the way in which the novel's female protagonist finally confronts her childhood through the act of autobiography. According to Chick, Lucy's conception of linear time is a psychological evasion that, in the end, gives way to the concept of cyclical time, reflected in the narrative itself.

In the final chapter of Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid, the protagonist's new apartment faces a clock on a tower that Lucy “stared at … for a long time before [she] realized that it was broken.”¹ This image points to an important theme in the 1990 short story cycle: Lucy's sense of time and how it affects her identity. She claims that

there is a line … there it is, your...