Lost Innocence

innocence...it's a subject that Lucy brings up towards the end of the novel, as she is evaluating her life. She says on page 153 "I was twenty years old-not a long time to be alive- and yet there was not an ounce of innocence on my face." It makes her feel disconnected from the rest of the world, as if she will never really belong to the city. She feels this way about both the city and her home island. She feels like an outsider in both places, and because of her conflicting experiences in both places she feels like she can't relate. Her experiences from her childhood have given her a different insights than the people that grew up in the city, therefore they don't really understand her, and vice versa. Then she comes to the city, and what she goes through there isolate her from the people she knows from home. She no longer can talk to them about things they could possibly imagine. She has become trapped between two worlds, and it makes her completely alone.

Anger

Anger is a funny emotion. It can motivate someone to do or feel something completely alien, something completely out of the ordinary. It can create this reaction inside a person that is so opposite of what they have said their whole life, or in this case, book it makes the reader very confused. After Lucy hears her father has died, she feels many emotions, much of which she doesn't really know how to detail. But there is one line that sticks out to me that portrays anger. "My father died leaving my mother a pauper" I realize that Lucy did not have a close relationship with her parents, which is a subject for another blog post, but I didn't realize until this moment that if it came down to it, her feelings for her mother were so strong, whether they be good or bad, that her thoughts would almost immediately travel to her mother in this time of sadness. She is angry at her father for the condition he has left her mother in. She has attempted to express her distance and frustration with her mother the entire book, but when it comes to a time of crisis, she still identifies with her and is angry at the person leaving her mother in a vulnerable position. Even though this person is her own father! The contradictions in feelings I think is a frustration that Lucy struggles with, because she still refuses contact with her family, so who knows what she is actually feeling for her mother, but from this line, it is indicative towards empathy to her mother.