Grief In The Lovely Bones

Have you ever wondered why people react differently to grieving? People have varied reactions when it comes to the death of a loved one or the loss of something they cherished, but why do their reactions vary? Why don’t people all have the same or similar reactions to this process considering the causes are similar? Well, it seems that there is a lot of variety due to the fact that people's backgrounds and their general selves can determine a lot about how they react to the situation. This idea is portrayed no better than in the novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, where we explore the daily lives of the Salmon family, in a small suburban town, after the death of their oldest daughter, Susie. Although, there is a lot of mystery surrounding her death as murder is quite rare in this town, though from the evidence that occurs it seems Susie was murdered. Little do they know, the neighbor, Mr. Harvey, is the culprit simply hiding away making the perfect getaway by hiding in plain sight. Through this family, we see them all develop their grief in different ways over the course of years causing them to become completely different people due to how they dealt with their grief. The changes that we see from all of the characters …show more content…
She did this by using a first-person omniscient perspective from Susie who seemed to be able to talk about a plethora of different information, seemingly since she was in heaven. Through Susie, we see how characters are from many points where she looks into all of their individual developments, however we never end up seeing into the minds of those characters or what they think. Susie is essentially our unreliable narrator as she’s constantly putting in her own point of view, so it’s likely that this bias has certainly caused the reader to change perspective on Susie as well as the other