Themes In The Lovely Bones

Adis K, EKJU15

The Lovely Bones

There are two major themes that are continually being presented throughout the novel “The Lovely Bones”, these themes are grief and hope. This essay will analyze how different individuals from the Salmon family cope with the death of a family member and their way of advancing with their lives.

Losing someone close to you is tough, especially if it’s a family member. Abigail Salmon is the mother of Susie that she loses early in the novel. This has affected her actions and way of living her life and even pursuing teenage dreams. Since Susie didn 't arrive for dinner Abigail still kept her hope up that nothing unusual had happened and that her daughter was in safe hands. Successively she started becoming worried and made phone calls to neighbors …”as my mother made phone calls..” (p 55) which shows us that she is upset. The hope of Susie one day arriving back home started fading away as the days went past and additional evidence came through the police indicating Susie being dead.

Going through these tough times Abigail couldn’t show affection to anyone as she had done earlier and therefore the relationship between her spouse, Jack, weakened up. Ignorance is becoming a way out of the constant thoughts regarding her lost daughter. This is achieved by rereading books she had read in her teenage years and slowly but surely she enters her own world, a place where she is herself. On page 50 we find a quote that reveals Abigail’s past, “It was the