The Lovely Reactions

In the novel The Lovely Bones, it is the reactions of the characters to Suzie’s death that show their true colors. When Jack Salmon, Suzie’s father, finds out she is dead, it completely consumes him. He becomes obsessed with catching his daughter’s killer because he feels that in some sense he can make it up to Suzie for not protecting her enough by catching the murder. I believe that this reveals the father’s humanity because the loss of his first child has hit him so hard it eventually becomes what drives him. He has no one to reach out to to help him deal with the loss for two reasons; the first being that he is the father and therefore must be the strong one to help his family get through this. The second reason is his wife Abigail becomes so completely overwhelmed by Suzie’s death that ultimately she has to sever all ties with her family to overcome the shock. Suzie’s murder also causes Jack to become understandably more protective of his other two children Lindsey and Buckley, “Before leaving the house, my father checked on Buckley—to make sure, to feel the warm breath against his palm.” Although as time goes on and people get on with their lives, it seems that he never completely overcomes Suzie’s death, but rather it is always sitting there in the back of his mind.


Suzie’s sister Lindsey is another character who reacts to Suzie’s death in a while that I think most teenagers do when someone close to them dies; she shuts people out. When Lindsey finds out her sister is dead she is so shocked she becomes frozen. When talking to her principle about her playing soccer, Lindsey mentions Suzie’s murder as casually as the morning weather. Cold and distant, Lindsey emotionally secludes herself from everyone, including her father when he tries to find comfort in her, “‘What? she said. Her face was rigid, an affront . . . ‘I want to know how you are,’ he said . . . ‘I’m handling this alone.’ He looked at her and could of said ‘I’m not, I can’t. Don’t make me,’ but he just stood there.” I feel like Lindsey is taking the “If I don’t talk about it or think about it, it’ll go away” approach to dealing with Suzie’s death. She does not begin to open up until Samuel Heckler reaches out to her and gives her the necklace for Christmas. Lindsey realizes that it would not be fair to Suzie to entirely shut down. After Lindsey begins to recover and move on from Suzie’s death, there is a brief moment where she too becomes focused on catching her sister’s killer, although not to the extent that her father does.

Both of these characters deal with grief in a way that reveals their characters. Alice Sebold humanizes her characters in The Lovely Bones by having them feel pain and make mistakes, for those are some of the things that separate the mortal from the immortal. Jack tries to relieve the guilt of having let his daughter down and Lindsey works to accept and move on with her life after loosing someone that was so close to her. (537)