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초록

Departing from conventional interpretations that frame Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy primarily as a narrative of identity formation or postcolonial resistance, this paper offers a phenomenological rereading of the novel. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of écart (gap), it examines how Lucy’s subjectivity is constituted within a fundamental non-coincidence between self and world. The analysis proceeds through three interconnected sites of perceptual gap: gaze, bodily sensation, and silence and writing. Lucy does not passively internalize the gaze of others; rather, she returns it, exposing a reversible yet asymmetrical structure in which seer and seen never fully coincide. This non-coincidence extends into sensory experience, where the same objects—daffodils, a landscape glimpsed from a train, the hands of those around her—are perceived differently across divergent horizons of memory and affect, producing irreducible gaps in meaning that no shared language can close. Silence, in this context, functions not as an absence of meaning but as the very condition of its emergence: a perceptual distance Lucy maintains against the meaning-systems of others. These registers converge in the novel’s closing scene of writing, where Lucy’s words blur under falling tears—signaling not the failure of expression but the ongoing constitution of meaning within the gap between experience and language. Ultimately, this paper argues that Lucy is not a teleological narrative of identity but a text that foregrounds an ontology of ambiguity. Through Merleau-Ponty’s framework, Lucy emerges as a subject who does not resolve the gap between self and world but inhabits it—continuously generating meaning within its irreducible openness.

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