TLB Research Paper

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Death, while terrible, can affect people in both positive and negative ways. Love that you have for others also is affected, being either strengthened or destroyed. True love however, may seem lost and irreparable, when in reality, true love always shines through. In the novel The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold uses foreshadowing, symbolism, and the point of view to demonstrate the mental and physical boundaries overcome by the most powerful emotion: true love.
Susie Salmon, a new addition to heaven, at first despises the idea that she is in fact dead. With the love that grows for her ever-aging family and earth-friends, along with the new-found love for her recently made friends in heaven, she is able to overcome this anger and regret to move on into the next heaven. Susie explains A simple game they oftentimes played in heaven, which helped to ease her emotions. “‘How to Commit the Perfect Murder’ was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.” (Sebold 83). The icicle as susie’s murder weapon of choice in the classic heaven game is a dead giveaway of george harvey’s eventual fate. This foreshadowing also helps us feel a sense of revenge as Harvey finally gets what he deserves. Susie’s choice of this weapon helps us know that though he was never caught and jailed as he should have been, what goes around comes around, and the icicle was no match for Harvey. Susie finally got her revenge. The love Susie had for all the innocent girls harvey may have chosen as his next victims was so strong that she was able to convince the icicle to fall and kill the one who had killed her. this revenge was out of the love she had for mankind, and this love conquered the boundaries of death into life, and life into death....

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...enews the love she had for her husband. Jack now understands what Abigail was thinking when she made her escape, and also finds his love for his wife again by realizing that his sadness and despair over Susie’s death was holding him in place and causing him to neglect the needs of those he loved that were still living. They both realized that they had not been there for eachother through this struggle and found that the best way through this was together. They find out that moving on was much different from forgetting, and that they could get through this and move on as long as they did it together. The story The Lovely Bones shows us that one never stops learning after death. Susie learns more in heaven than on earth, giving the reader quite the same experience before their own death. This book helps us gain a new perspective on the strength and power of true love.

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