Achieving happiness through suffering
The Lucy Temple book offers a paradoxical ending that cannot go unnoticed by readers. Most of the characters are depicted as unhappy at first because life is not fair to them. For instance, Lucy is in love with Franklin, but life in the future is unpredictable. When Franklin goes to the battlefield, he dies. However, Lucy remains, and she ends up happy through philanthropy. However, the reader expects Lucy to mourn her lover, but she decides to be happy without him.
The paradox of love
Lucy and Franklin are madly in love, and they are about to get married. However, Franklin first decides to introduce Lucy to his father before making the next move. When Franklin shows his father the photo of Lucy on his sickbed, he is shocked to discover that Lucy is his half-sibling and an illegitimate daughter of his father. The paradox of discovering that Lucy is his sister was too much to bear. Instead, Franklin decides never to go back to Lucy but instead to the battlefield.
The satire of secrecy
In most cases, people think that what they do in concealment will never come back to haunt them. However, Susanna dismantles this assumption by introducing characters Lucy and Franklin, who fall in love to reveal the truth about Franklin's father. Lucy has always been the illegitimate daughter of Franklin's father, but this was top-secret. Since Lucy's mother died while giving, she never got the opportunity to know her biological father. The harsh revelation about Franklin's blood relationship with Lucy is when he discovers that she is his sister.
