Yunjin+Kim's+Summer+Reading

=**Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold** = = = = = 

=**Essay #1 A Quest** = People have their own abilities to choose decisions for themselves. They contribute their self in order to achieve what they want. Every novel has a reason for its own goal and obstacles that block them from successfully fulfilling it. However, most of the time, the reason for their goal is not what they truly end up with. They start for a certain cause, but in the end, they find themselves filled with different answers they were looking for. In Alice Sebold’s //Lovely Bones//, another quest is to be finished and to find a new life. The main character Susie Sebold, is striving desperately to find her true identity throughout the process.

Susie Sebold, a typical teenager who was murdered at a young age is between life and death. She is particularly living up in heaven where she thought everything was perfect. But she eventually finds out that she is missing something. She then wanders down to her family and seeks for revenge for her murderer. She only wanted Mr. Harvey to die and she did and fill her solitude by making him exposed. However, she fortunately finds a different path to fill her missing spot.

Just like Foster explains how the quester fails at her stated task in //How to Read Literature Like a Professor,// Susie does fail to meet her original goals she once protested. Instead, her perspective revolves around the people she cares. She becomes mature and finds her “self-knowledge” (Foster 3). Susie no longer fights to retrieve her life back, and accepts her life in heaven, “...my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be” (372). She also no longer clangs on the past, and learns during her quest, that she has to let everything go and start a new one.

=**Essay #2 It's more than a storm** = Every time a certain weather or atmosphere is presented, it’s always more than its presence. Literature always illustrates everything in a complex but adequate manner where every aspect seems to be more than it is meant to. A storm can feature anything an author desires it to be, it simply cannot be storm itself. In Alice Sebold’s //Lovely Bones,// you also can easily get a grasp how this concept is effectively used throughout the story.

Lindsey, the protagonist’s sister, is secretly watched over her sister at all times. Susie feels she could get lost more than with her sister than anyone else. As the couple tries to reach Lindsey’s home for her graduation ceremony, a storm approaches and stops them. They take refuge from the storm in a nearby abandoned house that Samuel immediately falls in love with. He then proposes to Lindsey to marry him and live with him in this house. They exquisitely become excited and run back to their house where her family awaits.

As Foster presented many elements in //How to Read Literature Like a Professor,// it’s never just a rain and a weather is just not a weather. This factor can control the atmosphere and mood around it just like it did in Alice Sebold’s novel. Thus, in Lovely bones, it could be targeted as a plot device like Foster once explained. The storm forces them into finding the dream house of Samuel, and provokes them to get married. It stimulates the important decision making, and without the storm, this marriage might have never taken place. The storm itself had forced them to shelter each other, “the rain had lightened the people” (275). This storm may also be recognized as Susie’s restoration for love. She desperately wished for her family to be happy again and this marriage triggered the sorrow family to slowly heal their absence of Susie.

=**Essay #3 She's in heaven for a reason** = Every move in a novel has a reason for itself; it holds a need to portray an important aspect. When a writer introduces a ghost into a story who lacks the ability to speak to other characters, it gives a very insightful accommodation. The fact that in Alice Sebold’s //Lovely Bones//, Susie Salmon appears as a figure from heaven makes everything complicated. Alice introduces a new concept from a perspective of the dead, and illustrates beyond the ordinary point of view. Thus, there is certain reason why the author put the protagonist in such a unique position.

Much of the novel is depicted with grief, and the process how Susie Salmon gets over with her murder. She was raped and killed by a unfortunate neighbor, and after her death, chains of events starts to revolt around her. She emerges around her family and friends, trying to point out her killer, but is sadly blocked by her in-existent in earth. But, Alice Sebold put her in such spot for a more dramatic result. Although she’s just presented as only a ghostly figure, she gets to confront herself various times to help her loves ones move on. Instead of writing a thriller, the author purposely shifted the narrator to Susie’s perspective which changed the focus from suspense to emotional impact.

Collectively, these details of the plot resemble the topic in chapter twenty-two in Thomas C. Foster’s //How to Read Literature Like a Professor//. Foster explains that a lot of things happen when a writer specifically puts a character in such position. It allows the readers to contemplate the reason, “The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them” (40). These varieties of moves create every other character to act “differently in subtle ways” (202).

=**Essay #4 Concerning Violence** = Violence is popular for being a main topic for many novels. It certainly does give a broad impact into the readers. However, in Alice Sebold’s novel //Lovely Bones//, violence gives a different effect. Although it’s the same events such as murdering and raping, it’s just not all about the literal action. Violence could be interpreted in several ways containing meaning beyond the subject and act itself (88). Sebold’s book is not about evil itself, but about the effects of the violence. It deals with how the victim’s copes over their grief and losses of the young victim.

Susie Sebold was a fourteen year old ordinary teenager who was raped and murdered maliciously by her next door neighbor, Mr Harvey. He approaches Susie in the cornfield and asked to visit her to see something he built. While Susie feels very uncomfortable and scared, at the same time she feels sorry for him. He then strikes her and starts murdering Susie. At the end, she feels hopeless under the hole that Harvey made squinting just like a “dying animal” (13).

As foster explained meticulously in //How to Read Literature Like a Professor//, metaphorically, this physical force intended to trigger other important factors in the story. Violence is not just violence, it’s one of the most overawed acts a human can do. Sebold is just not dealing with violence itself, but she is trying to expose the true meaning under it. Susie could not let this pass by so she continuously appears after her death to warn her family and to protect all women and girls from him. No one is immune from violence, but rather touched by it. Like Susie thought,” I was the mortar, he was the pestle”, the impact was dreadful (14). Rather than focusing on the act, Sebold concentrated on the issues of loss and grief, identity and self, and heaven and earth.

=**Essay #5 Is that a symbol?** = Many readers are still anxious to know whether something is a symbol or not. But it purely depends on the viewer itself since nobody can judge if it is correct or not. It has several meanings to it, and you can decide and choose it by your own perspective In Alice Sebold’s //Lovely Bones//, symbols are presented everywhere including the title itself. However, the most popular symbol in the book is known to be isolation. This symbol contiguously starts to appear in the novel with different thematic scenarios.

This novel is a story of a young women’s murder told from the point of view of the dead victim, Susie Sebold. Susie recognizes that she no longer exists in earth but actually in-between earth and heaven. She observes her family up from a distant and grieves over her family’s loss and sorrows after her death. Chains of events happen such as the separation between Mr. and Mrs. Salmon, Susie’s different atmosphere with her family, and the outcasts of Ray and Ruth. Also just like the book title, Susie’s bones are parted from each other and buried and scattered in different locations.

Although symbols are normally expected to be “certain objects and images”, Foster explains thoroughly how it could be illustrated as events and actions in //How to read Literature Like a Professor// (105). Symbols do not specifically have to mean something, it is meant to be complex but subtle. Sebold shows variety of types of symbolism throughout the novel that works to connect to each other. Each Isolation occurs accordingly just like the Salmon’s did, “My mother and father ended up standing in the same room downstairs...they had come in from opposite doorways (29). Collectively, although it seems like it doesn’t meant anything, the solitude action was presented once again. These small actions add up and make a whole new representation of the losses of the Salmon family. In the end, they finally reunite invisibly in Susie’s secret heaven.

=**Comments** =

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