Being human is a solitary experience. In spite of being social animals, people are essentially alone, isolated by individual perspectives and experiences. Strout probes this idea in many of her novels. In Lucy by the Sea, she explores this through the literal isolation many experienced during the Covid pandemic. Lucy Barton grapples with isolation throughout the novel, using metaphor to try to understand it.

Lockdown is a metaphor for human loneliness, as well as something that actually took place. During the Covid pandemic, many areas, including New York, went into lockdown. Beyond essential services, all New Yorkers were ordered to stay indoors. Lucy realizes that the lockdown is a more tangible representation of humanity’s true, constant state of separateness. This revelation comes one evening as she and William are driving home. Lucy felt:

[T]hat old, old desolation, because these were houses where people lived and did normal things, this is how I had seen it as a child and it is how I saw it now, and I said to William, ‘My whole childhood was a lockdown. I never saw anyone or went anywhere’ (173).

At the end of the novel, Lucy broadens this understanding: “We are all in lockdown, all the time.