Alice Sebold’s successful novel, Lovely Bones, focuses on the struggle of a family to rebuild their own lives, in the aftermath of the rape and murder of one of the children.The novel is all the more powerful and realistic as it is inspired by an autobiographical experience of the author. The act of unbelievable violence done to the fourteen-year old Susie Salmon has a deep impact on the lives of the other family members.
They have to strive both to accept the murder as a fact and to try to reconstruct their lives afterwards.Violence and death interrupt the normal course of life and require the family to find new means for coping and moving on. The Salmons’ home becomes thus a symbolic space in which the family has to regain its unity and balance.Susie tells her own story and that of her family from a vantage point in heaven, where she can assume an omniscient perspective. The focus of the narrative is thus on the way in which the Salmons’ confront the loss of their eldest daughter.
The fact that the story is told in the voice of the dead girl who watches over her family from heaven emphasizes the separation of the girl from her family through the brutal act of murder done by Harvey. Had Sebold chosen to exclude Susie completely from the story, the breakup between the girl and her family would not have been so deeply felt by the audience.Harvey’s murder changes not only Susie’s destiny but that of the entire family as well, who have to understand the girl’s death and to be able to adjust to life without their daughter.The short introduction that precedes the first chapter of the novel is very significant for the overall meaning of the story.
Susie recalls her talk with her father about a snow globe that she used to play with. The snow globe is an image of a perfect, self-enclosed world in which the penguin is safe and protected from any outside danger:“When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly inverted. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin.
The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this he said, “Don’t worry Susie. He has a nice life, he’s trapped in a perfect world.”(Sebold 3)In the real world in which the Salmons live however, things as terrible as the rape and murder of a young girl do exist and are apt to change the people’s life forever. Sebold emphasizes this idea of the murder that changes the community’s perception of its safety from dangers and horrors: “It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.
”(Sebold 5) The Salmons have to cope with the horror of violence as death as well as with their grief.Significantly, the Salmon family is initially divided by loss of Susie. Their implication in the research about the murder breeds confusion among the members of the family. Abigail begins an affair with the detective that investigates the case, while Jack starts harassing the police about Harvey whom he suspects. The parents thus grow apart and Abigail finally leaves the household, thus violating the unity of the home.
The separation of the parents is an effect of the murder which reverberates long after its actual occurrence.The Salmons’ home becomes a place in which they have to find a way to rebuild their lost unity as a family. When the murder is finally solved and Lindsey perilously obtains proof of Harvey’s guilt, the family is already broken. Abigail moves out, thus dissolving the unity of the family, after Jack’s violent outbreak that makes him disturb the meeting between a girl and her boyfriend that takes place in the same cornfield where Susie had been murdered. This is another effect of the murder on the family.
Moreover, the relationship between the parents and the remaining children, Lindsay and Buckley, becomes very strained. Buckley for instance suffers when he is admonished by his father for playing with some of Susie’s old clothes that he had found in the basement. After this incident, Jack suffers a heart- attack that gets him into the hospital.This new grief brings the family together once more, but the encounter is still full of tension. Finally, both Jack and Abigail admit their failings and realize that the separation had been caused by the tension and the grief surrounding their daughter’s murder. The story thus revolves around the tragic aftereffects of the murder that change the structure of the family.
The members of the family are forced to find new ways in which to communicate with each other and to rebuild their relationships. It is significant that the family reunites ultimately, managing to find resources for a new beginning. As Sebold observes, the grief manages to create new connections inside the family.Their home is almost like a living organism, which is reborn after having been nearly destructed by grief: “These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone.”(Sebold 203) Interestingly, Susie confesses that, in the end, she is able to see the world without picturing herself in it.
This fact is also valid for the remaining family who rebuild their home managing to cope with the missing element: “And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future.The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.”(Sebold 203) The end of the novel is marked by the family’s reunion in their newly found peace.
