AP Lit - Prose Prompt - Lucy: A Novel
The following essay is meant as a study guide only and definitely is not an invitation to cheat. With that said, feel free to borrow from it, paraphrase it, and adopt ideas from it that you like. Sometimes the best way to learn to write well is to read how someone else might have written a response to the same prompt. For many of the AP students I interact with, the primary challenge is learning to form an argument that builds on itself in a logical way. You may find reading my response helps you formulate a strategy for answering the prompt. Learning to integrate evidence in a way that makes sense to the argument is another key skill that can boost an essay score. Read this carefully and see how it compares to your own writing.
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Last reminder; if you're doing a "cut and paste" with this essay then that's plagiarism and that can have huge consequences. Plus, your AP teacher will know. Trust me. They know your writing, your voice, and they know when you turn in an essay that doesn't sound like you.
A person's identity, or who they identify themselves as, can be tied to their family, their job, their school, their hobbies, their race, their religion, etc. Of the ways that people create their identity, perhaps none is stronger than the identity tied to their sense of place. In the excerpt from Lucy a novel by Jamaica Kincaid, the narrator finds herself in a new and unfamiliar place that challenges her identity. The author uses figurative language along with details and tone that are juxtaposed in a way that reveals the narrator's inner turmoil and sense of being unmoored.
The passage uses metaphor, both to illustrate the narrator’s situation, and to help the reader identify with the narrator. The latter is accomplished in the third paragraph through a description of the narrator’s experience of reading books. Since the reader of the passage is presumably reading Kincaid’s novel, the narrator’s credibility is enhanced by that sense of a shared experience with the reader. Having described the emotional experience of being impatient with a literary character experiencing homesickness, the narrator has disarmed the reader from making similar judgements of her. The other, more important metaphor uses weather and climate to demonstrate the narrator’s feelings about her past and her future. In this metaphor the sun represents the narrator’s sense of herself or her sense of place. In the second paragraph the narrator’s descriptions of the sun mirror her emotional state. She initially describes the sun from her past as being such a bright yellow that it made “everything curl at the edges, almost in fright”. Then moving to the sun of her present moment, and her present emotional state and her new location in a northern climate, she reflects that it was a “pale-yellow” as if it had “grown weak from trying too hard to shine”. Finally she describes her future in terms of its lack of sun, a gray seascape full of rain that represents her bleak outlook. The progression from past, to present, to future leaves the reader with a strong sense of the narrator’s doubts about her transition to her new setting. The interesting contrasts in the metaphor of the sun continue in the narrator’s choice of detail.
The narrator seems to juxtapose detailed descriptions with vague descriptions that reflect the challenges to her sense of self. Details are offered most particularly when they represent some positive aspect of the narrator’s emotional state. She describes the positives of the “day-old food” from the refrigerator, along with the details of her happy memories of the past in her bed she had outgrown, or the pink mullet her grandmother cooked for her. Each time there is a positive emotion the author reinforces it with details that heighten the positivity. Contrasting these details are the omissions or vague statements around subjects she associates with negative emotions. These are most evident in her descriptions of her unknown future. Certainly the narrator’s future is unknown to her, so it would be forgivable that she might not offer detailed descriptions. However, had the narrator viewed her future with a sense of optimism she might have reinforced it with details about her plans or aspirations. That her descriptions of the future lack detail tells the reader enough. The omission of detail isn’t reserved for the narrator’s future though, as demonstrated by her recollection of reading novels with characters who came from bad circumstances and recalling that she “was not in a very nice situation” herself. Without offering details about what made her circumstances difficult, the reader is left to their own imaginations about what she might mean. The contrasts between details and omissions continue with contrasts in the tone of the passage as well.
The narrator’s tone shifts throughout the passage and represents her internal conflict. The first paragraph begins with a tone that seems to express a kind of giddy wonder that the narrator was feeling, in the moment, as she had just taken her first elevator ride and was enjoying food kept in a refrigerator. That same paragraph, though, finishes in a tone that reflects the narrator’s sense of being overwhelmed, stating that she had fallen asleep, not from exhaustion, but in an attempt not to “take in anything else” from her new setting. The second and third paragraphs follow a similar pattern, with each starting in a tone that reflects hope, positivity, or a warm memory; then each paragraph finishing with words like gray, blank, cold, black, blacker, and blackest, that establish a change in tone that reflects her pessimism about the future. These contrasts within each paragraph help the reader understand the narrator’s complex sense, or loss, of her own identity.
Did the narrator love her past or was she trying to escape from it? Was she hopeful for the opportunities of a new place, or did she dread her future? The reader can’t know the answer to these questions because the narrator herself doesn’t seem to know the answers. The entire passage reflects the narrator’s doubts about who she is, who she was, and who she will be.