The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold

Peter Jackson’s 2009 film, The Lovely Bones, is based off of the New York Times bestseller novel written by Alice Sebold. Both the book and the movie adaptation tell the story of a young, 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon who is brutally murdered by her neighbor. In both versions, Susie narrates her story from the place between Heaven and Earth, the “in-between,” showing the lives of her family and friends and how each of their lives have changed since her murder. However, the film adaptation and the original novel differ in the sense of the main character focalization throughout, the graphic explanatory to visual extent, and the relationship between the mother and father.

George Harvey is always depicted as the vile, relentless murderer behind the rape and death of Susie Salmon, the protagonist of the novel Lovely Bones. It is easy for the reader to show absolutely no pity for this character. However, in Chapter 15, the author Alice Sebold converts this heartless soul into an individual that urges the reader to offer him sympathy instead. Sebold begins the chapter by reflecting on the tremendous amount of hardships that George Harvey endures in his childhood. As a child, George and his mother depend on each other, as they struggle through life in poverty and dread the presence of his father. Alongside his mother as her accomplice, they turn to theft as a method to receive food and resources behind his

“Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.” -Alice Sebold. Alice Sebold the author of Lovely Bones creates a story of depression, guilt, and grief with the murder of Susie Salmons. In Lovely Bones the death of Susie affects all those close to her, like her mother, her father and her classmates. Her father grieves with despair as the murderer has yet to be caught. Her mother can not handle her disappearance and finds unnerving ways to cope. Susie’s classmates, Ruth and Ray both find ways to cope with each other and through other connections with Susie. A death of a loved young one is one no one is ever ready for. The grief starts and people find ways to feel guilty. If no mental aid is present the associates will

The characters in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones are faced with the difficult task of overcoming the loss of Susie, their daughter and sister. Jack, Abigail, Buckley, and Lindsey each deal with the loss differently. However, it is Susie who has the most difficulty accepting the loss of her own life. Several psychologists separate the grieving process into two main categories: intuitive and instrumental grievers. Intuitive grievers communicate their emotional distress and “experience, express, and adapt to grief on a very affective level” (Doka, par. 27). Instrumental grievers focus their attention towards an activity, whether it is into work or into a hobby, usually relating to the loss (Doka par. 28). Although each character deals with

At some point in their life, every person has been told to “walk in somebody else’s shoes” because they need to be aware of the struggles that other people face, but it is often tough for people to understand things outside of the scope of their own practical knowledge. In her memoir, Lucky, Alice Sebold suffers from this same problem. Throughout the course of her narrative, Sebold thinks of her experience as something that is accessible to be understood by outsiders; in addition to this, Sebold paints her reactions and experiences as a model that she can apply to other victims of sexual assault. Even though Sebold’s story is one of strength in the face of horrible occurrences, her lack of acknowledgement in regards the ways in which other people’s consciousness and coping mechanisms differ from her own makes it far more difficult to sympathize with her than it should be considering the content of her memoir. Evidence of her closed world understanding can be seen from the beginning of the memoir, when she reports her sexual assault to the police (Sebold, 3), later in the narrative, when other people react to her experiences and related feelings (Sebold 146), and finally, and perhaps most significantly, when her close friend Lila undergoes a sexual assault (Sebold 220).

Visualize a world where a significant person in your life died from one’s gruesome desire, where that special someone suffered and became a victim of a cruel, mysterious murder. Was the murder itself quick or was it revolting and brutal? Susie Salmon was a victim of a crime that should not be forgiven. In the novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Susie’s past on earth affected people that took part in her life because the past was all that they had of her. Memories of or with Susie were treasured; however, they were also feared by the one who killed Susie’s future.

The current paper tends to explore the conceptual literature illustrated in two different novels entitled as Outside the Bones and Delirium. Moreover, the presented paper will highlight the role of female protagonist and their mystical, ghostly, and paranormal influence in the narrations.

Susie and her father Mr. Salmon both throughout the novel The Lovely Bones written by Alice Sebold (2002) change each other as a consequence of Susie’s murder. Alice Sebold uses Negative tone and Hyperbole literary techniques to demonstrate the change between Susie and her father through the Narration by Susie about Mr. Salmon for example when Susie talks about how “Mr. Salmon was crazy with grief and had gone out to the cornfield seeking revenge”. Through the use of these Techniques Alice Sebold tugs on the emotions of the audience and allows them to reflect on the change in the Salmon household between losing a daughter and wanting to gain closure and as a consequence of this the audience become torn between two decisions and Alice Sebold enables the audience to consider their life morals. All through the text Alice Sebold grants the audience the understanding to the concept of change and these examples help the audience to mould their thinking through her use of various literary techniques.

"Emotions are like waves. You cannot stop them from coming but you can decide which ones to surf". As described in this quote, we cannot delete our emotions but if we learn to surf the waves of our emotions and manage our thoughts and feel our feelings, we will be able to deal better with the difficult situations in life. Grief is the conflicting and strong emotion caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behaviour. Each individual deals with grief in very different ways. In Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" and William Shakespeare's "Hamlet", the main theme and emotion portrayed throughout the two works is grief with the intent of revenge. In Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones", the Salmon family find it difficult to grieve

Salmon was really uneasy, nervous, and seemed hesitant to ask my questions. I got the feeling that he didn’t want to show these emotions to his children, although I am sure they understand. Their poor son…he must have no idea what is going on, or why his sister hasn’t returned. Mr. and Mrs. Salmon must have told the boy, but he mustn’t understand. Moving onto my unpopular opinion, Mr. Salmon’s uneasiness and Mrs. Salmon’s absence are certainly having effects on their children. Mr. Salmon is so determined to find this killer, that he isn’t concerned about his health nor his children, leaving him unable to raise his kids properly. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t be able to raise my children correctly. That’s just my opinion, though. When I spoke to Jack, I asked him clear questions with an easy answer, such as “How do you plan on finding this killer?” “How are your children doing with this whole situation?” “How is your wife doing?” That question hit him hard, his response was “She did not think that she could handle being home more than a few days. Everywhere she looked she saw Susie, and at the booth across from her she saw a man who could have murdered

In contrast, acceptance of people even through pain is prevalent in The Lovely Bones. After Susie’s murder, Abigail leaves the family and heads to California, where she remains for five years. The news of Jack’s heart attack finally summons her back to where she is needed as a wife and mother. Instead of steeping himself in anger and grief, Jack only moves on and learns to love his wife through the great loss she inflicted on him. When Abigail returns home to Jack’s bedside in the hospital, he tells her, “I fell in love with you again while you were away” (Sebold 280). Indeed, Susie herself reflects that, “His love for my mother wasn’t about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything- for her brokenness and her fleeing…and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes” (280, 281). Despite the pain she has caused him, Jack

In the novels Oryx and Crake and Frankenstein, mental health impacts the main characters and their everyday lives. Each character has been through different life changes that influence their state of mind. To more thoroughly comprehend what each character is going through, this paper analyzes the life changes that occur due to each characters’ mental state.

Instead, various pathological states, some based on identifications arising from the traumatic event, seem to offer a way for the person to keep going.” (Hobson, 148-9) It is evident Abigail does not want to mourn when she refused to go to the one year anniversary of Susie’s death in front of the

Throughout The Lovely Bones and Middlesex, Alice Sebold and Jeffrey Eugenides, respectively, articulate the emotional journeys that both of their characters endure when faced with grief. Although they bear similarities, such as how both characters are able to move towards the idea of acceptance, the differences between The Lovely Bones and Middlesex are clear in the paths that each character takes in the various stages of grief to reach their destination of inner peace. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, studied the various stages of grief and describes them as: “not linear; neither are they equal in their experience. People 's grief’s, and other reactions to emotional trauma, are as individual as a fingerprint.”

Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky explains her own reasons for writing The Lovely Bones as well as her other novel The Almost Moon. These novels are an honoured piece from Sebold’s own violent past of being raped in an underground tunnel whereas another girl held there was dismembered and killed; memories haunting her as she recalls lying on the tunnel floor, seeing a girl’s pink hair tie and thinking about the last moments of that poor girl’s life. The description of these events is extremely similar to the physical end of Susie’s life. Thankfully for Sebold, she survived and her rapist was prosecuted for his actions, however, the details of the murdered girl were unknown. The novel The Lovely Bones also provided comfort also for the 9-11 victims’ families as the book is a sign of hope for their