The Lovely Bones Character Analysis Essay
The Lovely Bones Essay
Readers will often think about characters long after a text has been finished. Analyse how the WRITER made a CHARACTER or characters MEMORABLE for you in a text you have studied.
In The Lovely Bones, a provocative account of a young girl’s life and death, by Alice Sebold, we are thrust into the cruel reality of Susie’s mislaid youth. We are immediately introduced to the protagonist, Susie Salmon, “like the fish,” who wastes no time in describing her brutal and gruesome death, followed by her ascent into heaven, where she reminds us of her dreams on earth, which suddenly slipped away. Susie was the most substantial and memorable character for me, because of the way in which she encompassed the themes of the novel, such as the bonds between family, and entrapment, as well as Sebold’s bold narrative style, which has Susie narrating her own story from a perch in heaven, with great use of imagery. Any reader can immediately identify with Susie’s wave of emotions, and it is ultimately this …show more content…
which makes her memorable.
The immediate striking feature of this novel is its narrative style, which has Susie telling the story of her life and death. Susie is the victim, murdered as a 14 year old, by a neighbour named Mr Harvey. Being told in first person, the reader feels an instantaneous empathy with Susie, and this feeling is heightened by her unabashed confidence in us, almost as though the reader is in fact a conceptual journal. She confesses her dreams and regrets on earth, like her relationship with Ray “Our only kiss was like an accident,” and her longing to go back, “I couldn’t have what I wanted most. Mr Harvey dead, and me living.” Susie is an omniscient narrator, complicated by the fact that she is also a character. In this way Alice Sebold facilitates the reader to identify with Susie, because we read the story with her bias and perception of events. In this novel, Sebold wants to demonstrate how violence can so easily be brushed again, and the people affected categorized. She tries to make obvious the frequency in which these events can occur, even in what we condescendingly refer to as the suburbs. Susie’s blunt narrative is very memorable because it describes a typical life before her murder, and the typical lives of Mr Harvey’s’ other victims, in a way which highlights the fragility of life.
Sebold’s writing features great use of strong, usually morbid, imagery, in particular in the most brutal scenes.
“He was the pestle, and I was the mortar,” is a prime example of Susie’s memorable imagery, and bold honesty. She describes how she needed to fit her limbs back together, and how the oil stain in Mr Harvey’s house was really her, “seeping out of the bag... spilling onto the concrete. The beginning of my secret signals to the world.” With this dramatic imagery, the reader becomes drawn into the book, and Susie’s initial quest for revenge, followed by her development as a character to accept the wrongs done to her. The images of Susie’s heaven in particular, portray an abstract world, filled with everything, and nothing, reflecting Susie’s bewilderment at her new position. Sebold has used immensely powerful imagery to convey her vision of Susie, and the book, and this assists the reader to lose themselves in the story and truly remember
Susie.
Susie is stuck in a perfect world, which she foreshadows in the opening paragraph, where her father shows her a penguin snow globe and comforts her, “Don’t worry Susie. He’s got a nice life. He’s trapped inside a perfect world.” Thus this parallels Susie’s entrapment in heaven, a prominent theme in the novel. Susie is memorable for the reason that she represents a character who craves most what they can never have again, a well worn account. She feels the bewilderment and anger of a shortened life, and feels purposeless. “I came to believe that if I watched closely and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on earth.” Though she acts as a tacit witness to her families’ lives and emotions, she cannot truly be with them, and we see the irony Sebold has used in creating Susie’s perfect heaven, with all the material things she desires, but not what she truly wants. Susie goes through a memorable journey as she tries to accept the loss of her life on earth, her family, and her “dreams on earth.”
Susie’s relationship with her father is extremely close for the era in a ‘nuclear family,’ and this makes Susie’s death all the more wretched. The relationship is consistently referenced with the motif of the Snowglobe, reflecting Susie’s life after death. Jack’s struggle to find acceptance from his daughter’s death cannot be downplayed, but it is Susie’s heroic effort that makes her particularly memorable. Faced with the death of her Father, it is Susie who must deny her yearning for her father, to let him remain with Buckley, whose “greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away.” Susie is trapped by her love of her family, and her inability, probably like all 14-year-olds then, and this century, to see a life beyond those she has always known. Susie’s obsession with her past life is evident through her constant use of flashbacks. What touches us, and makes her memorable, is her unrelenting fascination with how her family deals with her death and the endless ripples it causes in their lives. Sebold wants her readers to explore the concepts of grieving, from the view of the living, and the dead, and how grief can trap someone.
Susie is a memorable character because of her transition into maturity, and this makes her extremely admirable. Susie must cope with not only herself, but also her family, moving on from her death. “I was beginning to wonder if this had been what I was waiting for... for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone." It seems to the reader that once Susie has finally ‘moved on,’ she becomes less attentive to time on Earth, disengaged from the last events of Grandma Lynn and Mr Harvey’s deaths, Lindsay and Samuel’s marriage, and her parent’s happily ever after ending. Susie overcomes her feelings of injustice and betrayal, and with this moves on to “the place I call this wide, wide Heaven... somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams."
Susie’s posthumous reflection on her life cannot fail to draw in the reader, with her blunt honesty, reflection of key themes, strong imagery, and first person narrative. But more than that, the reader can feel for Susie, and the things that she can never have, because of her shortened life. Susie most certainly remains in the reader’s mind as a memorable character because Sebold has crafted a character that admirably confronts her crisis, and learns to accept her reality, a lesson which is so relevant to everyone, due to the unforeseen nature of events everywhere in life. Sebold ultimately impresses upon us through Susie’s journey the concept of maturity, not as an age, but the time at which one can accept the past.
Readers will often think about characters long after a text has been finished. Analyse how the WRITER made a CHARACTER or characters MEMORABLE for you in a text you have studied.
In The Lovely Bones, a provocative account of a young girl’s life and death, by Alice Sebold, we are thrust into the cruel reality of Susie’s mislaid youth. We are immediately introduced to the protagonist, Susie Salmon, “like the fish,” who wastes no time in describing her brutal and gruesome death, followed by her ascent into heaven, where she reminds us of her dreams on earth, which suddenly slipped away. Susie was the most substantial and memorable character for me, because of the way in which she encompassed the themes of the novel, such as the bonds between family, and entrapment, as well as Sebold’s bold narrative style, which has Susie narrating her own story from a perch in heaven, with great use of imagery. Any reader can immediately identify with Susie’s wave of emotions, and it is ultimately this …show more content…
which makes her memorable.
The immediate striking feature of this novel is its narrative style, which has Susie telling the story of her life and death. Susie is the victim, murdered as a 14 year old, by a neighbour named Mr Harvey. Being told in first person, the reader feels an instantaneous empathy with Susie, and this feeling is heightened by her unabashed confidence in us, almost as though the reader is in fact a conceptual journal. She confesses her dreams and regrets on earth, like her relationship with Ray “Our only kiss was like an accident,” and her longing to go back, “I couldn’t have what I wanted most. Mr Harvey dead, and me living.” Susie is an omniscient narrator, complicated by the fact that she is also a character. In this way Alice Sebold facilitates the reader to identify with Susie, because we read the story with her bias and perception of events. In this novel, Sebold wants to demonstrate how violence can so easily be brushed again, and the people affected categorized. She tries to make obvious the frequency in which these events can occur, even in what we condescendingly refer to as the suburbs. Susie’s blunt narrative is very memorable because it describes a typical life before her murder, and the typical lives of Mr Harvey’s’ other victims, in a way which highlights the fragility of life.
Sebold’s writing features great use of strong, usually morbid, imagery, in particular in the most brutal scenes.
“He was the pestle, and I was the mortar,” is a prime example of Susie’s memorable imagery, and bold honesty. She describes how she needed to fit her limbs back together, and how the oil stain in Mr Harvey’s house was really her, “seeping out of the bag... spilling onto the concrete. The beginning of my secret signals to the world.” With this dramatic imagery, the reader becomes drawn into the book, and Susie’s initial quest for revenge, followed by her development as a character to accept the wrongs done to her. The images of Susie’s heaven in particular, portray an abstract world, filled with everything, and nothing, reflecting Susie’s bewilderment at her new position. Sebold has used immensely powerful imagery to convey her vision of Susie, and the book, and this assists the reader to lose themselves in the story and truly remember
Susie.
Susie is stuck in a perfect world, which she foreshadows in the opening paragraph, where her father shows her a penguin snow globe and comforts her, “Don’t worry Susie. He’s got a nice life. He’s trapped inside a perfect world.” Thus this parallels Susie’s entrapment in heaven, a prominent theme in the novel. Susie is memorable for the reason that she represents a character who craves most what they can never have again, a well worn account. She feels the bewilderment and anger of a shortened life, and feels purposeless. “I came to believe that if I watched closely and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on earth.” Though she acts as a tacit witness to her families’ lives and emotions, she cannot truly be with them, and we see the irony Sebold has used in creating Susie’s perfect heaven, with all the material things she desires, but not what she truly wants. Susie goes through a memorable journey as she tries to accept the loss of her life on earth, her family, and her “dreams on earth.”
Susie’s relationship with her father is extremely close for the era in a ‘nuclear family,’ and this makes Susie’s death all the more wretched. The relationship is consistently referenced with the motif of the Snowglobe, reflecting Susie’s life after death. Jack’s struggle to find acceptance from his daughter’s death cannot be downplayed, but it is Susie’s heroic effort that makes her particularly memorable. Faced with the death of her Father, it is Susie who must deny her yearning for her father, to let him remain with Buckley, whose “greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away.” Susie is trapped by her love of her family, and her inability, probably like all 14-year-olds then, and this century, to see a life beyond those she has always known. Susie’s obsession with her past life is evident through her constant use of flashbacks. What touches us, and makes her memorable, is her unrelenting fascination with how her family deals with her death and the endless ripples it causes in their lives. Sebold wants her readers to explore the concepts of grieving, from the view of the living, and the dead, and how grief can trap someone.
Susie is a memorable character because of her transition into maturity, and this makes her extremely admirable. Susie must cope with not only herself, but also her family, moving on from her death. “I was beginning to wonder if this had been what I was waiting for... for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone." It seems to the reader that once Susie has finally ‘moved on,’ she becomes less attentive to time on Earth, disengaged from the last events of Grandma Lynn and Mr Harvey’s deaths, Lindsay and Samuel’s marriage, and her parent’s happily ever after ending. Susie overcomes her feelings of injustice and betrayal, and with this moves on to “the place I call this wide, wide Heaven... somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams."
Susie’s posthumous reflection on her life cannot fail to draw in the reader, with her blunt honesty, reflection of key themes, strong imagery, and first person narrative. But more than that, the reader can feel for Susie, and the things that she can never have, because of her shortened life. Susie most certainly remains in the reader’s mind as a memorable character because Sebold has crafted a character that admirably confronts her crisis, and learns to accept her reality, a lesson which is so relevant to everyone, due to the unforeseen nature of events everywhere in life. Sebold ultimately impresses upon us through Susie’s journey the concept of maturity, not as an age, but the time at which one can accept the past.