How "The Lovely Bones" promotes dominant ideologies

People change with time, through new experiences and changing views. This ideology is dominant in our society, and can be seen greatly in the text, The Lovely Bones through character development. It is this controversial issue, after all, that lead to the recent explosion of media coverage over the Bali 9 executions in Indonesia. Some people believed that the felons had changed so drastically during their prison life that they had become a whole new person, someone not responsible for those devastating crimes. This ideology of reform, rehabilitation and forgiveness varies, but there may be no doubt that it holds a key place in our growing society, and in The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

To know how a person has grown, changed, you must first know where their journey began. “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” This is the start of everything, the first foundations for a magnificent work of art. In this first paragraph, we learn many things; Susie is telling her own story from first-person point of view, she is dead, killed in terribly tragic circumstances, and she is young. The language is so abrupt, so sudden, it shocks us as readers. There is no intricate introduction, no background or history to start the tory. We are thrown right to the point, so harshly that we reflect on the shock Susie must feel. This shock is the first stage of grief, the first step in a long journey of change ahead.

The story is built around change; Susie, once innocent and fragile, grows from experiencing the thoughts and lives of those around her to become a women trapped in a child’s world. “What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.” This quote is an important display of the power of three, but it also contains a hidden key to the puzzle. It was later in the book that Susie, once feeling trapped in heaven away from her old life, frozen in a child’s body even as her mind matured, claimed differently. She soon admits to believe that she was not lost, frozen or gone, but that she was alive in her own world. By having Susie never question Ray’s idea back when it first crossed his mind, but then leading to her using the same three words in an echo of his thoughts, only twisted backwards to deny their truth, Susie has visibly changed in the eyes of the audience.

There are some circumstances in which this ideology of change shifts to become subordinate. “Murderers are not monsters, they’re men.” This is a frightening realization to Susie, who once trusted Mr Harvey, until she learnt the hard way that it wasn’t the bogey-man to be wary of. Throughout the text, Mr Harvey barely changes. He is constantly on repeat, building an underground room or a cultural tent, murdering girls in a systematic manner. He has a rhythm that never breaks, and we come to learn that his views were brought about by his childhood many years ago. Mr Harvey never evolves and it is this same belief that eventually allowed us to execute the Bali 9 felons.

Yet there is some bias in the book, some places we are asked to agree with the idea that people change over time, and some places we are asked to discard the notion. “In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on,” Susie claimed in the start of Chapter Three. It is in this passage that she reasons with us, makes us believe that it was not her fault that she brushed by Ruth, and we willingly agree. She was young and innocent, recently murdered, and we instantly turn the blame on Mr Harvey when, in reality, he had no control over Susie’s actions after death. He was wrongly accused, but never changes, and we can constantly lay the blame on him, and never on Susie, who is actually at fault for Ruth’s life after her own death.

In this way, only changes are seen positively in the text. The characters all cycle through the stages of grief; denial and shock, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. In the end, everyone finds a form of peace through the magnificent Lovely Bones Susie described, the connections, and they have become new people, new characters to those who had started the journey. It is only Mr Harvey who is punished, both in the text and by the reader, for his inability to evolve into something new. This is how the text effectively promotes the dominant ideology that people change over time.