The Lovely Bones: What the Living Owe to the Dead and the Dead to the Living
In her novel The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold asks us whatresponsibilities families have for each other and argues that theconnections wrought by blood and love never end. She tells her story fromthe vantage of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, whose responsibilities to herfamily should have ended in 1973, when she was raped and murdered by herneighbor. But just as her family has not forgotte
She is simultaneouslywretched that the woman she might have been casts a terrible shadow overher younger sister while at the same time she is even angrier that she willnever become that woman This a story about what the living owe to the dead and the dead to theliving and the ways in which we never, ever escape our families. And she grieves forherself, for the life that she should have had. She grieves along with her family, each of whomis undone in a different way by the fact of her death. But it isalso a celebration of love and of hope, and of the precious joys that eachday brings until death makes all things past. The novel successfully and innovatively plays with the ancient ideathat the dead do not leave us entirely until after they have finished theirbusiness on earth, and Susie still has unfinished business with her family(whom are devastated by their grief), with her killer, with the detectivetrying to solve her murder. n her, she does not forgetthem, and spends the novel looking down on them from heaven where "life isa perpetual yesterday".
Common topics in this essay:
Susie Salmon,
Alice Sebold,
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Acceptance Essays
