Comparing The Memory Keeper's Daughter And The Lovely Bones

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards, and Alice Seabold’s The Lovely Bones, both similarly explore the ways in which grief influences and ultimately structures the lives of their central characters. Although the authors utilise vastly disparate situations, Edwards and Seabold both depict the development of their families in response to the demise of a relative. Through the progressive transformation of their protagonists, the major themes are exposed to reveal how their struggle inflicts their future and the surrounding characters. The role of grief is established to determine how individuals seek closure through a variety of demeanours, in that the central couples exhibit dishonesties and cheating as a consequence of their loss. A

variety of literacy elements assist in establishing the central theme as a catalyst for the characters’ despair and isolation.

Edwards and Seabold utilise dissimilar introductions to portray the deaths of their central characters and reveal how David Henry and Jack Salmon struggle with their loss. Each text separately incorporates flashbacks to contrast the lives they lead prior to their sorrow. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter slowly retells David’s past, allowing the audience to understand that his sister suffered a heart defect at a young age. Her passing triggered him to experience pain and numbness, also placing immense strain on his parents and eventually tearing his family apart. His childhood experiences ultimately influence his decision to send his first-born daughter to an institution immediately after he discovers that she has Down Syndrome. In that moment, David believes that his choice will “spare them all a terrible grief,” but he later realises that “perhaps it was not so much Paul he’d been protecting… as some lost version of himself.” The night of Phoebe and Paul’s birth is described to be “the turning point of his life,” foreshadowing that “in many nights to come” he would realise “the ways in which [he] was jeopardizing everything.” HIs lie, “I’m so sorry. Our little daughter died as she was born,” drives the plot and is the source behind the characters’ grief. Norah’s response to Phoebe’s supposed death creates tension between the couple and she ultimately notices, “after a year of marriage, she hardly knew him at all.” David “had changed…he was no longer really there,” and he feels as though he isn’t able to speak openly with Norah in guilt of his secret. Contrastingly, Seabold opens her story with the line “I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” Susie recounts her death, depicting the graphic details of how her neighbour raped and murdered her. Flashbacks are incorporated throughout the novel to illustrate the Salmon family’s lives before Susie’s murder. Her memories of her childhood demonstrate how Jack’s detachment from his children is influenced by his grief. Following Susie’s death, he begins to isolate himself in the confinement of his office, distancing himself from his wife and children. He eventually breaks down in tears “[falling] against [Susie’s] bed, sobbing and [balling] the lavender sheets up in his hands.” Initially, he is stunned in disbelief; however, eventually his grief is channelled into determination to discover Susie’s murderer. He compares a monopoly shoe to represent Susie in attempt to explain her death to his son. Buckley decides to keep “the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn’t there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.” Seabold incorporates this situation to demonstrate how Jack is capable of appearing contented, accentuating how his struggle is much more internal. Equally, the authors employ flashbacks to emphasise the ways in which the characters experience change. While Edwards uses foreshadowing to prefigure how grief inflicts the lives of her characters, Seabold emphasises the long journey of mourning through symbolism.

Through the use of contrasting narrative techniques, Edwards and Seabold accentuate the changing relationships between parents as a result of their grief. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter employs a third person omniscient narration, allowing an insight into the lives and thoughts of all of the characters. Though The Lovely Bones is narrated through first person perspective, Susie acts as an all knowing all seeing character from her position in heaven. Edwards illustrates Norah’s grief through “the disorder of their house” that “pressed on her like a weight, as if the very sunlight had taken on substance, gravity.” The relationship between David and Norah is initially depicted as flawless, as he “[watched] her, he felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife.” After Phoebe’s apparent death, the couple are compared to “two planets in orbit around the same sun, not colliding but not drawing any closer.” David is ultimately overwhelmed with the guilt of living with the lie that he created, as Norah “[longs] to bridge the distance between them” that she believes “she had made.” She begins to notice a change in herself, she didn’t “want to be the person she seemed to be becoming, set loose by grief into a world that made no sense.” Norah turns to alcohol in attempt to fill the void in her heart. She “almost always had a quick drink…to ease into the afternoon,” carrying a “silver flask in her purse.” Likewise, Susie observes change in her parents’ relationship as they deal with their grief individually. They had once been “deeply, separately, wholly in love,” but following Susie’s death “[Norah] began to drift.” Although the “evidence was mounting... they refused to believe” that their daughter could be gone. Both characters clung onto the smallest hope, but eventually “something broke in [Abigail]. The fine wall of crystal that had protected her heart- somehow numbed her into disbelief- shattered.” Meanwhile, Jack channels his frustration by destroying the ships-in-bottles that he and Susie once built together. Shattering them one by one, he reflects on “all the years they marked and the hands that had held them.” Susie narrates “in those first two months [her] mother and father moved in opposite directions from each other.” As her room becomes “a no mans land in the middle of the house,” its untouched atmosphere remained a symbol of what they had lost. Although their house appeared to be the “same as every other one on the block…it was not. Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.” Contrastingly to Edwards, Seabold’s character turns away from alcohol, “[pouring] the scotch down the kitchen sink… afraid [he] might drink it.” Both Edwards and Seabold create similar situations to reveal how the death of Phoebe and Susie gradually disintegrates the relationships between their parents.

The two authors employ a variety of techniques to illustrate how grieving individuals continue to distance themselves from their families.

In both texts lies and cheating emerge as parents drift further from their partners and children. Norah’s affair with a man named Howard creates tension between the couple and although David is aware, he remains silent “because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.” The central couple are again symbolically compared to the solar system, as they “circled each other now, fixed in their separate orbits.” David’s obsession with photography becomes a distraction from his grief, but their “lost daughter still hovered between them; their lives had shaped themselves around her absence.” Eventually, he leaves town and travels back to his childhood home in an attempt to find closure. Similarly, in Seabold’s text, Abigail has an affair with Len Freeman seeking comfort in an effort feel emotion again. In his presence, “the need to get out, to smash, destroy, rescind, overtook her.” Abigail “needed Len to drive the dead daughter out” and to take away “her rage, her loss, her despair.” These lies and secrets create a barrier between Jack and Abigail, as Susie observes how he tries to touch her “and she [pulls] away over to the edge of the bed. But how in the presence of the police she seemed to bloom.” The “pragmatic, prim mistress” that Susie knew her mother to always be “was gone. She was

flighty and distracted.” Resembling David, Jack becomes primarily focused on the unknown evidence regarding Susie’s murderer, which render him incompetent of supporting and providing parental guidance to his remaining children. He becomes desperate to place blame because it “was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he’d lost.” His obsession further drives Abigail away as he frantically tries “to swim back to her…to reach her again. She was pulling and pulling away.” Eventually she chooses to leave home and move into her father’s cabin, travelling to California and cutting all ties with her family. Through a similar, yet different fashion, Edwards and Seabold both reveal their characters to be incapable of confronting their grief.

Edwards and Seabold present contrasting conclusions, establishing their characters ability to overcome sorrow and reconcile with it.

David and Norah’s house becomes symbolic of their continually disintegrating relationship. Originally, it represents their mutual love and the family they were destined to have, however, David’s lie transforms the house into a reminder of their loss. Norah’s suffering causes her to sell the house because “whatever life her daughter had known, whatever Norah had experienced of her daughter, had happened in that house.” Her decision to remarry represents her ability to heal and progress past her grief. Although they divorce, David never lets go of his love for Norah “for multitude of ways in which their love had failed them all, and they love. Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.” David’s sorrow haunts him up until his death, carrying his lies and suffering to his grave. Contradictorily, Seabold employs the theme of recovery to conclude her novel. The light outside on their front porch becomes symbolic of their hope for Susie to return. On the night that Jack attempts to kill Mr. Harvey, it is turned out, representing the closure they will obtain when her murderer is finally captured. Jack seeks resolution through Mr Harvey’s death, which is foreshadowed by Susie earlier when she comments “how to Commit the Perfect Murder was an old game. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.” The birth of Lindsey’s daughter adds a sense of formal

unity to the novel, as the story begins with death and ends with birth. The text is concluded as the sinkhole is bulldozed and Susie’s charm bracelet is uncovered by a stranger, who comments that “the owner…will be all grown up by now” and Susie replies from heaven that “[she is] not grown up yet.” Throughout the novel she advances through her own stages of grief and recovery in heaven, attempting to move on from the tragedy and allow her family peace. She finally becomes confident that her family is safe in the absence of Mr. Harvey and ultimately stops observing them. Edwards and Seabold equally utilize symbolism to conclude their novels in a dissimilar manner.

In the texts The Memory Keepers Daughter and The Lovely Bones, Edwards and Seabold equally reveal the role of grief in transforming the lives of principal characters and their struggle to reconcile with their loss. Although the plots differ greatly, the authors similarly employ a variety of techniques to exemplify their characters’ journeys of bereavement. Furthermore, literary elements are incorporated