The Lovely Bones Theme Essay

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.

The death of a loved one can result in a trauma where the painful experience causes a psychological scar. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones explores the different ways in which people process grief when they lose a loved one. When young Susie Salmon is killed on her way home from school, the remaining four members of her family all deal differently with their grief. After Susie’s death, her mother, Abigail Salmon, endures the adversity of losing her daughter, her family collapsing, and accepting the loss of the life she never had the opportunity to live. Abigail uses Freud’s defence mechanisms to repress wounds, fears, her guilty desires, and to resolve conflicts, which results in her alienation and

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,

“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

Susie, watching this from afar, begins to understand that she was not Mr. Harvey's first victim (something she has already explained to the reader) and that he is a serial killer who has killed women young and old going as far back as 1959. As Lindsey explores Mr. Harvey's basement, the names and deaths of his other victims become known to Susie.

For example, each family member goes into Susie’s old room alone to grieve her death .They finally seem to realize that they need each other to get through this terrible time and accept that even though they will never have Susie back but can hope and try together to figure out what happened to Susie and who did it. Throughout the book they must learn to love each other again.The theme of grief is the most important theme in the novel. The Salmon family must learn to overcome the loss of Susie. Everyone grieves in their own way and finds a way to blame themselves or feel like its their own fault that the situation happened. Susie's family feels a sense of guilt for not being there for her. For example, Susie's father, Jack grieves for Susie.He feels like he wasn't there when his daughter needed him most which leads him to becomes obsessed with feeling responsible for finding the killer. Lindsey, Susie’s sister grieves over her sister by becoming a stronger person and not to talking about it. Susie’s also mourns her own death and the missed opportunity of getting to grow up, but more significantly, Susie grieves over the loss of living people. This theme allows us to understand the characters better.

In Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones, the Salmon family learns that their fourteen year old daughter, Susie Salmon, has been raped and murdered. Because of this her father, Jack, sister, Lindsey, and mother, Abigail, all go through their own respective journeys in order to accept this ordeal. During this time of grievance for Susie’s family, her father, Jack, believes that the person responsible for the murder of his daughter is his neighbour, a man named George Harvey, and reports this to detective Len Fenerman. However, Len Fenerman becomes too preoccupied with his affair with Abigail to aid Jack with his suspicions. Meanwhile, Susie’s younger siblings Lindsey and Buckley, try to learn how to cope with the loss of one of their very own, without their parent’s attention to aid them. In The Lovely Bones, Susie’s father, mother, and sister, all explore the theme of grief by going on their own pathways through the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, in order to come to terms with the brutal murder of their beloved Susie.

There are two main themes that are continually being presented throughout the novel “The Lovely Bones”, these themes are grief and hope. This essay will analyze how different individuals from the Salmon family cope with the death of a family member and their way of going forward with their lives.

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.

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

Susie worries most about her gifted and petulant sister Lindsay. Lindsay is only one year younger but still is not told directly about what's happened to Susie; instead she hears telephone snippets and bits of conversations between her parents and the police. After hearing her father describe Susie's features, she asks her father not to lie to her, so he doesn't; but even answering her question, he can't face the truth of his words. Susie watches Lindsay sitting alone in her bedroom trying to harden herself. As the story unfolds, it is clear that Lindsay carries the hardest burden, because no one will ever be able to look at her and not think about Susie. By losing her sister, Lindsay is in danger of being robbed of herself.

Susie is the narrator of the story. She has been raped and murdered and feels enormous pain, even in heaven, for what has happened to her. However, she also presents careful connections about herself, family and friends. In these, we see her great love and compassion for those she misses dreadfully. We must not forget that she is also a character who must be examined for her own grief: Susie

III. Overview of the Book/Film Plot (internal or external conflicts) The Lovely Bones is about a girl named Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by her neighbor Mr. Harvey. When her family learns of what happened they grieve for a long time. The person who grieves the most is Susie's dad. He goes on a rampage trying to find and prove that Mr. Harvey is the one who committed the crime. He ends up going to the emergency room after going to the cornfield to see if George Harvey was there. His family is notified and his wife comes to see how he is and to hear what