Personal Study- “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold

Task : An analysis of the use of narrative voice in “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold to show the extent to which it manipulates our response to other characters.

“The lovely bones” by Alice Sebold is a novel about growing older and wiser and dealing with loss. It concerns an adolescent girl who is raped and murdered and has to watch her family get over her death while she is trapped in heaven. The unusual narrative voice in “The Lovely Bones” manipulates our response to Mr and Mrs Salmon and is crucial to our understanding of the characters. I intend to show at what extent this unusual narrative voice manipulates our response to central characters and the other techniques Sebold employs to do this.

In the weeks following her death, Susie watches Earth and how it continues without her. Even though Susie is dead, she manages to grow up while in heaven as her tone and perspective as a narrator changes throughout. She observes her classmates swapping stories about her disappearance, her family holding out hope that she’ll be found and her killer trying to cover his tracks. She sees her parents’ marriage fall apart and her siblings grow up to do the things she never had the chance to do. Through Sebold’s use of 1st person narrative we become close to Susie Salmon as she goes through the process of recollecting her brutal and untimely loss of childhood innocence. As we read on, we are faced with many emotions, such as sorrow and pity, which puts us in the position of one of Susie's family members as she describes all her thoughts and feelings in detail, involving the reader in her story.

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The setting is important to our understanding of this novel as it links to the narrative voice, illustrating the fact that Susie is the loneliest of all the characters. This is shown through Sebold’s use of Susie to describe in detail each character and event on Earth compared to the very brief descriptions of events in heaven, showing where Susie would rather be and whom she wants to be with. Here, “life is perpetual yesterday” and Susie relates the awful events of her death and her own adjustment to the strange new place she finds herself. For example, heaven itself ...

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