A Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes

And shes gone...

As I read this stanza from The beatles famous song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, I realized it went right along with our reading Lucy. From this reoccurring vision of yellow and the feelings it provokes to this brightly burning sun in her eyes.

As we've noticed this color yellow in multiple medias in class, we see that it carries many different meanings. In Jaws, a sign of caution. In Girl Interrupted, a sense of insecurity, but again a warning for bad things to come. In The Yellow Wallpaper, a sign of anxiety. In Lucy its a vision of beauty (not to be confused with perfection.) It is clear to us that yellow is dominant in provoking a feeling, it's just not always used to provoke the same feeling.

The other part of this verse that is reminiscent of Lucy is this girl with the sun in her eyes. In the novel lucy really struggles with fitting in. She didn't fit in with her past and she doesn't fit in with her present. She experiences a sense of nostalgia when she first sees the sun in her new city. Not because its similar to what she's used to, but quite the opposite. She talks about the sun in her new setting and how it is faded as opposed to back at home where its vibrant and stingy, so stingy it makes the objects in its light curl at the edges.

Parallels like these allow us to make better sense of our readings and enjoy them more. And novels like Lucy allow us to really bite into this juicy text and use these connections to better analyze the reading.

*I thought it was also funny that this was a song done by a British band, in connection to the influence England had on Lucy's life as well as the lives of all the other people living in the West Indies during that time period.