Secrets and silences – finding a voice to speak the unspeakable in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton.
Secrets and silences – finding a voice to speak the unspeakable in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton.

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the significance of silence and how the ability to speak is developed by the main character in My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. The voice she finds not only enables her to talk about certain events from her past but also express herself as an artist. The paper draws on Frank Kermode’s studies of memory and secrecy: Secrets and Narrative Sequence, Memory and The Man in the Macintosh as well as Esther Rashkin’s psychoanalytically grounded analysis of secrecy. The paper aims to show that silence is the driving force of the narrative.

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