Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Kincaid, Jamaica - Nancy Chick (essay date September 1996)

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Nancy Chick (essay date September 1996)

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

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. David Nicholson (review date 3 July 1988)
   2. Louis James (essay date Winter 1988-89)
   3. Susanna Moore (review date 7 October 1990)
   4. Giovanna Covi (essay date 1990)
   5. Opal Palmer Adisa (review date February 1991)
   6. Hilton Als (review date 18 February 1991)
   7. Evelyn J. Hawthorne (review date Winter 1992)
   8. Moira Ferguson (essay date 1993)
   9. Diane Simmons (essay date Summer 1994)
   10. Keith E. Byerman (essay date February 1995)
   11. Jamaica Kincaid with Ivan Kreilkamp (interview date 1 January 1996)
   12. Richard Eder (review date 14 January 1996)
   13. Merle Rubin (review date 17 January 1996)
   14. Lore Segal (review date 5 February 1996)
   15. Johanna Keller (review date Summer 1996)
   16. Louis F. Canton (essay date Fall 1996)
   17. Edyta Oczkowicz (essay date Fall 1996)
   18. Nancy Chick (essay date September 1996)
   19. Andrea Stuart (review date 11 October 1996)
   20. Jacqueline Brice-Finch (review date Winter 1997)
   21. Gay Wachman (review date 3 November 1997)
   22. Kristen Mahlis (essay date Spring 1998)
   23. Deborah Plant (review date Fall 1999)
   24. Maxine Kumin (review date March 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Jamaica Kincaid