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The Lovely Bones Isolation

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The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold starts with “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie, I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” and tells the story of how she was murdered by her neighbor and shows the lives from the people around and how they all changed while trying to get someone to find her lost body. Alice uses messages like loss, and isolation in The Lovely Bones.

After being murdered by her neighbor Mr.Harvey at the age of 14, Susie Salmon finds herself in a beautiful land, not Heaven, which is where she can comment and watch the lives of her friends and family. Susie’s body was never discovered and her parents suffer. The pain gets too much for her mother, so she leaves, but years later returns. Susie’s …show more content…
Susie is trapped in the “perfect world” and is isolated from her living friends and family. Because Susie has the need to watch her loved ones as they grow and change, she is also not able to be with her dead grandfather, who has moved on from watching the living. Susie tried to break free from her isolation from Earth by continuously pushing on what she named the “inbetween” so she is able to influence the world of the living. Susie’s family members isolate themselves in their loss rather than talking about the loss of Susie openly. For an example, each living family member goes into Susie’s room alone to grieve her absence. Mr Harvey is not able to grow out of his isolation. I believe that isolation can be a dangerous thing for people because it can obviously lead to mental health issues but it can also prevent people to emotionally grow or to recover from a loss, etc which is seen in the loss of Susie in her family. The quote “My mother and father ended up standing in the same room downstairs. They had come in from opposite doorways.” Susie’s parents are unable to be together in their grief of lossing her and so they push one another away and push themselves into

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