The Lovely Bones Surviving Grief

However, the characters in Ordinary People do not conform to the stereotypical gender grief scripts and instead reflect the different grieving styles captured in Martin and Doka’s (2011) grieving styles continuum. Martin and Doka (2011) conceptualizes grieving styles ranging on a continuum from intuitive to instrumental. Grieving styles reflect individuals’ ability to adapt to loss and are distinguished by their use of cognitive and affective domains to process grief.

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.

Suppressing negative emotions and unresolved conflicts can eventually have an impact on different aspects of one’s life. Abigail has restrained her grief for so long, and as her husband’s pursuit to find Susie’s murderer tests her patience, she uses Freud’s displacement defence mechanism “as a means by which the impulse can be expressed-allowing a catharsis of the original emotion-but toward a safer target (GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA). Len Fenerman, the local detective, becomes Abigail’s doorway out of her pent up emotions. She indulges in an affair with him as he offers her security and an escape from reality. In heaven, Susie deliberates upon this action:

The book All Souls: A Family Story from Southie is a powerful autobiography written by Michael Patrick Macdonald. Macdonald wrote this book to bring much needed attention to the crime, poverty and even loyalty that existed in South Boston (Southie), while growing up there. Macdonald wrote about his personal experiences, as well as the experiences of family in friends that lived about Southie, during the time of the notorious Irish Mob leader, Whitey Bulger, reigned over South Boston.

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

Loss of a loved one and the stages of mourning or grief manifest as overriding themes in The Lovely Bones. Through the voice of Susie Salmon, the fourteen-year-old narrator of the novel, readers get an in-depth look at the grieving process. Susie focuses more on the aftermath and effects of her murder and rape on her family rather than on the event itself. She watches her parents and sister move through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, Alice Sebold makes clear that these categories do not necessarily remain rigid and that individuals deal with grief in various ways. For example, Abigail, Susie's mother, withdraws from her living children,

To follow, one can choose to resort to another lover or to isolate themselves from their family. Susie’s mother, Abigail may have been the one who took Susie’s death with greatest impact.

The life transition of death and dying is inevitably one with which we will all be faced; we will all experience the death of people we hold close throughout our lifetime. This paper will explore the different processes of grief including the bereavement, mourning, and sorrow individuals go through after losing someone to death. Bereavement is a period of adaptation following a life changing loss. This period encompasses mourning, which includes behaviors and rituals following a death, and the wide range of emotions that go with it. Sorrow is the state of ongoing sadness not overcome in the grieving process; though not pathological, persistent

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

In the book, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, it presents a perfect example of a Survival of the fittest lifestyle. Only the best, the smarter, and the stronger ones, is able to survive, while the weaker individuals will be killed or dead. Lauren Olamina, the main character and her group travels towards the north by finding freedom. Many people did not have the mindset to be as strong as Lauren to survive, but she was extremely careful. She has always looked out for potential enemies wanting to harm or kill, but she was also creating allies to build her Earthseed community.

"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

When Susie Salmon comes up missing and the hopes for her survival become grim, her father engage in acts that endanger his freedom so he can figuring out how Susie’s life was lost. Mr.

Despite Buckley’s young age when Susie first disappeared, his life is greatly affected by the loss. He is extremely angry and resentful towards his parents. Buckley feels that his relationship with his father is shadowed by his inability to move past the loss of Susie. The tension between them peaks when Jack tells Buckley he cannot use Susie’s old clothes in his garden, but it is not simply about the garden. The garden is symbolic of new life and growth in the future and Susie’s shirts symbolize her existence. Although Susie’s clothes would no longer be intact, they would become part of the garden, just as Susie will always be part of the family even though she is no longer with them. This scene is also important for Jack and Buckley’s relationship because Buckley finally tells his father how isolated he feels. Abigail and Buckley’s relationship, on the other hand, is not so easily patched. Buckley is bitter that his mother missed so many important events in his life. The

Both books deal with the emotional affect that the dead have on the living. First, in The Lovely Bones, in the moments immediately after Susie’s death, her soul rushed towards Heaven and, as it did so; it touched a young girl called Ruth. Ruth was sensitive to this presence and despite not having known Susie well from that moment she became intrigued by her life and her death and began to form what would become a strong and eternal link between herself and the dead girl. As Ruth reaches adulthood she becomes sensitive to the dead and to the vibrations that exist in places where deaths had occurred. This affect is not only emotional but life changing; Ruth ultimately leads the police to seriously consider Mr. Harvey as the key suspect in Suzie’s murder. As Ruth is sensitive to those who have passed on, Susie is sensitive to those who remain living. She can read their thoughts, knows their motives, their emotions and their desires. She can remain close to those she loved, she watches over them and occasionally, when they are in a receptive mood, they can feel her presence. These episodes are explained in an extremely gentle manner by Sebold and in such a matter of fact way that it is impossible to doubt the veracity of what we are told.

In the movie, “The Lovely Bones”, directed by Peter Jackson, a 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon was brutally murdered on December 6th, 1973 by her next-door neighbor, named Mr. Harvey. At first, she went missing for a while and the police were only able to find traces of her hat, and an excessive amount of blood. This information led them to declare that Susie had been kidnaped and killed. In her poor state of mind, she did not realize