The Lovely Bones Susie Salmon Character Analysis

The unimaginable thought, yet the inevitable conclusion, to life is death. Everyone wonders what happens when we pass away but there is no way of knowing for sure. People come into this world with a life sentence, but don’t know when, where, how, or why they die. In thinking about the end of life, the last thing someone often imagines is being murdered. Susie Salmon found this out the hard way. Susie Salmon, a character in The Lovely Bones, written by Alice Sebold, was raped and murdered at the age of fourteen by a neighbor. Susie, who is narrating from heaven, watches over her loved ones, including her father, mother, sister, and grandmother. Susie’s character is difficult to understand and a devastating story to even consider. She provides a different perspective on Earthly happenings, and on how the dead and the living interact. Susie is essentially “living” life after death.

Many people associate tragic heroes with a fatal flaw such as pride, greediness and/or nobility. These flaws eventually consume their heroic characters and lead to his or her death. Aristotle

defines a tragic hero as “a character who makes a judgment error, that inevitably leads to his/her own destruction” (Aristotle, 1). Though a judgement error a tragic hero makes is typically a result of dignity, other characteristics of a tragic hero often go unnoticed. Trust, curiosity, and innocence. Susie Salmon possesses all of these traits (trust, curiosity, and innocence) which, essentially lead to “her own destruction.” As a tragic hero, Susie suffered more than she deserved. She put her trust into her murderer. She let her curiosity get the best of her. And Susie’s innocence left her dead. "I was no longer cold or weirded out by the look he had given me. It was like I was in science class: I was curious“ (The Lovely Bones, 34). Unfortunately, Susie realized, after the fact, that not all people are good. She had no idea that people like her murderer even existed, especially in her own neighborhood. Sadly, Susie had nothing but a slight instinct to warn her about her future killer. But her curiosity and innocence took over while she mistakenly and fatally gave her trust to the wrong person.
Susie watches her killer get away with murder, she watches her father become obsessed with figuring out exactly what happened, and the hardest thing Susie watches over is her family growing up, while she remains young. She watches her younger sister grow older than her and she slowly begins to see her family move on. “We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams” (The Lovely Bones, 17). Susie strongly suggests that when we pass away, our Earthly traits remain with us, and we continue to grow and change after we die. "If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free.” (The Lovely Bones, 52). As much as Susie wants to remain a part of Earth, she understands life continues to grow, even when she does not. She watches her family on Earth collapse and slowly rebuild from the tragic event of her murder. Susie represents life after death and the stages of grief she witnesses below her. She symbolizes the ideas of maturation and understanding. Although Susie dies at the age of fourteen, she is able to watch her peers and loved ones grow which gives her a sense of her own maturity. Susie does not change physically but she emotionally and mentally grows. While at first Susie felt anger and self-pity as she witnessed from heaven her sister receive her first kiss, she later felt happy for her and eventually loved watching her family grow and move on. Though it takes time, Susie slowly alters her focus away from her loved ones below, and transitions away from her existence on Earth.
“When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things,“ Franny said.

“What about the dead?“ I asked. “Where do we go?” (The Lovely Bones, 145). When Susie asks this to her friend in heaven, she hasn't yet understood why she must let go of her loved ones from Earth. She still wants to be a part of their life and watch them grow. But Susie must grow herself and let go of what she wants to be apart of most, Earth. When Susie speaks of Earth, she always capitalizes it, but whenever she speaks of her heaven, she keeps it lowercased. This indicates where Susie’s heart really is (Pink Monkey, 2). Many people understand the loved ones of a victim grieve, but no one understands how the victim grieves. Susie gives the readers this experience. She enters her own stages of grief and does not accept she has passed away. She wants to be there for her family and is unable to let them

go.
Though Susie is absent from Earth, she remains a huge part of everyones life from heaven. She communicates with them from the in-between and she remains in their memories. Susie also brings characters together through her death that would not have existed previously. While Susie is in heaven she carries with her the ability to grow and the capability of letting go of relationships she once tried so desperately to hold onto. From her personal heaven, Susie must watch as the world she left behind change in which she cannot be there to stop it from changing. While she realizes that she is no longer physically a part of the world, she still must grow up in order to move on from her earthly connections and into her adult version of heaven. Susie experiences this coming of age through the painful acceptance of watching her peers live life and figure out the meaning of her own death.
“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life” (The Lovely Bones, 363). When Susie speaks of “these lovely bones,” she is talking about everyone who was affected by her death. Her father, who became obsessed with figuring out what happened. Her mother, who in her own way, became absent and non existent when her family needed her the most. Her sister who grew and became all that Susie wished she could've been. Susie thinks about the strength her loved ones gained from her death. The Lovely Bones is a hauntingly beautiful story about acceptance and death.