Immediately upon coming America, Lucy is faced with disillusionment: the landmarks as she sees them are not what she dreamed them to be. Examine Lucy's several disillusionments and explain how they contribute to the formation of Lucy's evolving identity.
Sadly, Lucy has to learn that her expectations will not always reconcile with reality. Likewise, Lucy expects the landmarks to be as lucid as they are in her daydreams. In reality, they are crowded, dull, and dirty.
When describing her disappointment, Lucy notes:
In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my drowning soul...Now that I saw these places, they looked ordinary, dirty, worn down by so many people entering and leaving them in real life, and it occurred to me that I could not be the only person in the world for whom they were a fixture of fantasy. It was not my first bout with the disappointment of reality and it would not be my last. (3-4)
At the core of Lucy's survival is the dexterity with which Lucy handles disappointment and continues to forge her identity despite it.
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