After first reading Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, I didn’t have a great first impression of the main character Lucy. She seemed very standoffish and quite critical of anything that was new to her. She came to the states expecting great new things, but quickly found reasons to dislike just about everything. But after getting to know the character a bit more, one comes to a better understanding of why Lucy is the way she is. The way she grew up in the Islands was far different than growing up in the states. Where Lucy was from, things were under British rule. Her education was very structured, they were made to learn the things Britain wanted them to learn, such as the Daffodils poem that Lucy came to hate so much. Also, they had no “luxuries” in the West Indies. She wasn’t used to such things as the refrigerator, elevator, the concept of apartments, and so on. She also had no concept that the sun could be shining, yet it could be cold outside. Lucy’s bitterness really just comes from the fact that she didn’t know how to handle her emotions. We never see any real emotion until the very last page, when she wrote “ I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it” and she began weeping. Everything we see before this is negative, she never truly shows any positive emotion. We learn from reading that Lucy has a love-hate relationship with her mother. This is really portrayed through the letters exchanged between the two. At first, Lucy lies to her family and tells them that everything at her new home is absolutely great, and made it sound like something that would come from a Hallmark card. She desires to make her family, especially her mother, believe that they were wrong and that Lucy made the right decision in leaving everything, and everyone, she knew behind. She didn’t want her family to know that she was actually quite miserable. Lucy’s conflicting relationship with her family becomes more apparent later, when she discusses the letters she keeps near her breasts. Upon the first mention, one may think that she places the letters there out of compassion for those who wrote them, but as Lucy elaborates, it becomes quite apparent that this wasn’t her intention. She even says herself that she doesn’t carry them around from feelings of love and longing, but rather that it was from a feeling of hatred. The scorching and physical pain the letters brought from being kept near served as a reminder of the hatred felt towards family and the West Indies. The defiance Lucy feels towards her homeland becomes more apparent after she receives another letter from home in which her mother brought her up to date on things she felt Lucy would like to know about. After this, Lucy lets the reader know that she doesn’t care about anything that happens where her family is, she only wanted to put as much distance as possible between herself and anything involving them.