Davis 1
Braylin Davis
Mrs. Samantha Powers
English 112
31 March 2015
The “Lonely” Bones In the Novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, you discover the tragic story of Susie Salmon. Throughout the novel you begin to sympathize and understand who Susie Salmon was. Through laughs and sorrow you begin to recognize major themes that help convey the story of this novel. However, out of the numerous themes in the novel isolation is the most prominent. From Susie’s heaven to Mr. Harvey’s petite green house, isolation is everywhere. In the prologue of the book Susie has a flashback to when she would stare at a penguin inside of a snow globe; she worried that the penguin was alone. This foreshadows the ever-present theme of isolation throughout the novel. The first instance of isolation comes extremely early on in the book. In the first pages, Susie is murdered and transferred to her heaven. Susie verbalizes the she “began to desire more…[she] wanted to be allowed to grow up”. She speedily understands that majority of people grow by living; however, Susie is dispossessed of that privilege and isolated from living. While in her heaven, Susie spends a lot of her time watching her family grieve her death and also what is happening on Earth. However, Susie is never able to affect their lives
Davis 2 significantly. A specific illustration of this is when Jack attempts to avenge Susie’s death. Susie tries to forewarn him; stating that she “flashed fire through it [the cornfield] to light it up…none of it worked to warn him. I was relegated to heaven”. Afterward, Susie recognizes that she is isolated from Earth and can only witness the events unfolding in front of her. While Susie is in heaven, Earth is not the only thing she is isolated from. There are certain parts of her heaven she is isolated from. When he leaves her part of heaven, she steps into the cornfield nearby where she lived on earth. This is where Susie begins “to wonder what the word heaven meant; [she] thought, if this were heaven…it would be where [her] grandparents lived” and Susie would have no memory of what happened to her on Earth. Susie also goes onto say that her heaven exists with other people’s version of heaven. She can see the jocks playing basketball in their heaven, while still being completely isolated inside her own heaven. Susie is not the only character affected by isolation. Many of the people