The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold is a novel about a young teenage girl, Susie Salmon, who was raped and murdered by her neighbour. Susie narrates the novel from her own unique heaven that is in resemblance to her high school playground. The novel goes on to follow Susie watching the lives and thoughts of her family and friends while they deal with their grief of her devastating death. I am going to discuss why this narrative point of view if effective in showing how the death of Susie Salmon has affected the lives of her family and discuss their ways of grievance. In particular I will discuss the techniques, narrative point of view and characterisation to show this. The writer uses the techniques of Susie’s narrative point of view to show the effect of Susie’s death on her mother. As Susie is the narrator of this novel she looks down from heaven and sees her mother daydreaming about her life before her children and sometimes wishing she never had any children at all. Abigail was an intelligent and attractive woman who had her future planned out before meeting and marrying her h...
The Lovely Bones
With the lose of a loved one the experience of immense grief is a common emotion. In
Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, the Salmon’s lose their young daughter Susie in
the tragedy of a brutal murder. The family left behind experience great deals of grief
coping with the new absence. As Susie watches them from heaven, she tells their story as
they try to make their ways through life without her. Her renditions on her family
provided an inside look at how it is to lose a loved one and the process that follows.
When Sebold wrote The Lovely Bones she intended it to show how it is to face an
overwhelming lose and there are 5 crucial steps that one must go through to finally reach
a stabilized, new lifestyle.
The first stage in the grieving process is Denial. Denial is a conscious or unconscious
refusal to accept facts,...