Jason+Park's+Reading+of+Summer

=The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold = Jason Park

#1 Symbolism
The use of symbols in literature is as common as literature itself. Alice Sebold’s beautiful debut novel //The Lovely Bones// is no exception. Almost everything in this book has more than one meaning, from Susie’s Keystone State bracelet to the number 5, Alice Sebold transforms ordinary, everyday objects into unique symbols of a deeper meaning.

Right from the start of the book, our main character and narrator, Susie Salmon, is murdered. George Harvey, an impulse-driven sexual predator, convinced Susie to follow him into a secluded area where he promptly violates and then kills her. A few days after the initial investigation into Susie’s disappearance, the only thing detectives could find was Susie’s treasured Keystone State bracelet. However Susie’s sister Lindsey suspects George Harvey. As she steals important evidence from Harvey’s house, he witnesses the downfall of his facade: the blazing number 5 on the back of Lindsey’s jersey as she runs away with incriminating evidence in her hand.

With the help of Foster’s //How to Read Literature Like a Professor,// we can now interpret what these symbols mean. According to Foster, symbols can be open to interpretation and can have multiple meanings. The Keystone State bracelet is an obvious symbol of Susie, as it is the only thing that her family can hold onto reminding them of Susie’s last moments. The other main symbol, the number 5, is significant because the moment that Harvey saw the number on the back of Lindsey’s jersey he knew that he would have to change his game plan; eventually he left town for good. “The silk-screened number on her back screamed out at him. 5! 5! 5! Lindsey Salmon in her soccer shirt.” This quote shows how significant it is to Harvey: so significant, that he repeats the numbers in his head three times with exclamation points.

Foster explains that a symbol in literature can have a limitless number of meanings. The Lovely Bones is a beautiful novel full of symbols. Using this logic, it can mean that Alice Sebold’s masterpiece can have many meanings itself.

#2 Season
The seasons are nature’s way of showing the passage of time. A continuous clock, the four seasons can represent many things. In //The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold//, one season stood out more than the others: Winter. The sheer coldness of winter in Sebold’s novel is generally associated with another cold phenomenon: death.

In the novel, our fourteen-year-old narrator Susie Salmon is raped and murdered a few weeks before Christmas by the psychopath-cum-serial killer George Harvey. In fact, it appears as if Harvey prefers to kill during the snowy season, since the precipitation helps get rid of the incriminating evidence. Many years later, justice is served as Harvey himself falls victim to a freak accident involving a giant icicle and being buried alive under copious amounts of snow.

Winter, as claimed by Foster, shares a link with death in literature (Foster 178). This view is confirmed for the most part in Sebold’s novel. The gruesome deaths of Susie Salmon and George Harvey --untimely losses of life that occurred during the winter season-- verify this fact. Winter and death both share a common element in this respect: coldness. “The air inside… was cold and fragile. I could see the moist air when he exhaled, and this made me want to palpate my own stony lungs” (Sebold 57). In this scene, the dead Susie Salmon expresses her wish to be warm, to be alive. Sebold compares the cold climate of the winter season to Susie’s death.

As the days grow shorter in winter, so do the lives of Susie Salmon and George Harvey. It is only fitting that these characters would find their lives to end abruptly during what Foster describes as “a time of death.”

#3 Vampirism
It becomes evident the more one reads //The Lovely Bones// that Alice Sebold choose certain references to place throughout her novel alluding to 19th century Gothic Victorian literature. However, there are some major elements that can be traced back to Bram Stoker’s classic masterpiece //Dracula//, and more specifically, about vampires. According to Stoker’s novel, a vampire is one who exploits the weak in order to satisfy his/her own selfish desires to become stronger. In Sebold’s book, we are introduced to a serial killer, a modern day version of the vampire.

Vampirism makes a huge impact in The Lovely Bones, as our main antagonist, George Harvey, a middle-aged man, is revealed to be a psychopathic sexual sadist – by definition, a serial killer – who targets young girls such as 14-year-old Susie Salmon. He coerces the girl to follow him into a secluded area where he commenced to overpower, violate, and finally stab the poor girl to death.

Sebold herself added a nice touch to her novel by alluding to Dracula indirectly; in his spare time, George Harvey can be seen assembling beautiful gothic dollhouses.

There is a whole chapter in Foster’s //How to Read Literature Like a Professor// dedicated to vampirism. According to Foster, a vampire is usually an older figure that would adulterate a younger figure’s innocence. George Harvey, although not a literal vampire, is essentially doing the same action by robbing Susie of her virginity (an age old symbol of innocence) and of her life. While being subdued by Harvey, Susie felt “…huge and bloated… like the sea in which he stood and pissed and shat.” (Sebold 15). She is comparing her body to a clean sea that is being polluted into, in other words, she felt ugly and unclean. Furthermore, the loss of innocence and death of a weak young girl would be sustenance and sexual gratification for the stronger and older George Harvey: A textbook case of vampirism in literature.

#4 Weather
On reading the works of Alice Sebold, one cannot help but notice the amount of detail put into the scene’s specific meteorological conditions. The sheer multitude of weather conditions in Sebold’s //The Lovely Bones// sets rain as a symbol of two contradicting roles: An accomplice to evil, and the binding of people together.

In the novel, our fourteen-year-old narrator Susie Salmon is raped and murdered a few weeks before Christmas by the psychopath-cum-serial killer George Harvey. As a means to escape police suspicion, he cleverly exploits the rain to cover his footprints and blood trail, thus knocking himself off the suspect list. As the years pass after Susie’s death, her sister Lindsey can be seen running with his fiancé Sam to her parent’s house to announce their engagement during a heavy rainstorm. After Abigail heard news of her husband’s heart attack, she decided to pay him a visit for the first time in eight years. As they met together for the first time in ages, it started to rain.

According to his book //How to Read Literature Like a Professor//, Thomas C. Foster provides insight about the hidden meaning behind the weather on //The Lovely Bones//. Rain, also known as a form of precipitation, plays an important role in The Lovely Bones. According to Foster, rain may symbolize a great number of things, from a great personal cleanser, a form of punishment, and even as an isolating depression. However in this case, rain shrouds George Harvey with a veil of mysteriousness. He prefers to strike during downpours since it conceals and “…rob[s] the police of evidence” (Sebold 56). This masking behavior makes Harvey a product of rain’s mystifying properties. Rain also takes another role in this book: binding people together. They say that if it rains on your wedding day it’s good luck. However in the case of Lindsey and Sam, it rained on their proposal day, a day in which they were to promise to bind together forever. Similar to this, As Abigail met her husband; it started to rain, thus also binding together a long lost relationship.

#5 Journey
The quest is one of the most common things found in literature nowadays, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones provides us with many journeys. Although not generally physical journeys, //The Lovely Bones// is filled with tales of self-realization and discernment.

However there is one such quest that literally involves moving from one place to another. Abigail Salmon suffered intense emotional depression following the murder of her daughter Susie Salmon. With her condition showing no signs of lightening up, she gradually fades away from her family, particularly with her husband, and eventually moves to California to spend some time alone. Many years later, she hears news of her husband suffering a heart attack and decides to pay her old family a visit for the first time in eight years.

According to Foster and his book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, a quest requires a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials, and the real reason to go. In this case, our quester would be Abigail, and her destination would be back to her family in Philadelphia. Her stated reason was to check up on her sick husband, and along the way she is faced with self-hatred for leaving her family years ago and doubts that her family would welcome her back. On the plane to her husband, Abigail’s “body grew heavy with the dread of what would come but in this heaviness was at least relief.” This shows her reluctance to go; for fear that her family would reject her. Foster also states that the “real reason” for a quest was always self-discovery. Abigail eventually discovers that she in fact loves her husband after all, and although her family would never be the same, they managed to live happily ever after.

Comments
1. Kevin, I also read //The Lovely Bones// for my summer reading, and I agree and disagree with what you have written down. For this essay, you have chosen to go with the quest chapter from Foster's book, but I seem to have a hard time seeing the "quest" in The Lovely Bones. It is true that a quest requires a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials, and the real reason to go, however I believe that the experiences of Susie Salmon bar the notion of being described as a "quest." It is easy to see our main protagonist as the quester, however she soon realizes via Franny that there is no way she will return back to Earth. You state that her stated reason was "see her murderer caught," and "to meet her family and those she love," however Mr. Harvey never gets caught, and even on her brief time on earth she never meets up with her family. She realizes that she needs to move on, however and this would be the equivalence of the self-discovery described by Foster. Another quest i found in The Lovely Bones was the one Abigail Salmon took from California back to the hospital to check on her husband's condition, since it involves her discovery that she loves him after all.

2. Jenny, I also read //The Lovely Bones// by Alice Sebold, and initially I didn't accept the view of violence in the novel presented here, but it seems that you have found a quote that explains the essence of this book that I have failed to find. I have found your premise to be interesting, "without the death of Susie Salmon, t he story of __The Lovely Bones__ would never have even existed, because there would be no struggle to portray. " This is actually a very interesting way to look at it, but maybe a different chain of events would have happened, altering the very tone of this book, wouldn't you say? In a strange way, I am glad that Susie was killed, since a very beautiful story followed. Kevin is right, you could do a bit more with word choice and organization, and it seems strange that all these paragraphs are in different sizes and font