Literature Analysis Questions #1

1. The plot of "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold is about a 14 year old girl named Susie Salmon who was murdered by her neighbor. The story begins with her murder and continues to escalate as cops are searching for evidence and her body while she watches all of this from heaven. Susie then meets a new friend in her heaven and their "lives" continue up there as her family and killer's lives continue down on earth.
2. The theme of the novel would probably have to be deception. The main character in the story and her family are all being deceived by their neighborhood. He is seen as a normal, lonely man so he is seen as an unlikely suspect. Through the book, Susie goes back to several scenes involving the man who murdered her by luring her into  "clubhouse" and describing what he did with the weapon that killed her and the remnants of her body. Deception is a huge issue in this novel; not only did her own neighbor killer, but Susie's mother had an affair with the detective on the case.
3. I imagine the authors morning routine as peaceful and quiet. She would be an early bird and she would just grab a cup of coffee and sit on the couch reading a book, possibly her own. Alice Sebold seems like the type of person who understands peace which is why she wrote a book such death and finding peace in it. In  the book She writes, "As I stood to go back to the duplex, they took wing and followed me. Had my brother really seen me somehow, or was he merely a little boy telling beautiful lies?" She puts the peace in a thing so negative. Alice Sebold must be a person who sees the world in a different way and her mornings may consist of a thought process seeing something she never saw before. In in excerpt she gives a character some wisdom by saying "'Like snowflakes,', Franny said, 'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before.'"  Another excerpt she found peace in when writing was, "The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred."
4. One of the literary techniques seen in this book is characterization. An example of characterization is, "When Len Fenerman had gone door to door in the neighborhood he had found nothing remarkable at George Harvey's. Mr. Harvey was a single man who, it was said, had meant to move in  with his wife. She had died sometime before this. He built dollhouses for specialty stores and kept to himself." I think connects to the theme deception because I personally think people like this are particularly sketchy. Another literary technique is imagery. Imagery is very common in this novel such us, " Mr. Harvey made me lie still underneath him and listen to the beating of his heart and the beating of mine. How mine skipped like a rabbit, and how his thudded, a hammer against his cloth." This imagery compares to the theme deception because Susie's heart was descriptively heavy and she didn't know it would ever come to this. A literary technique in this novel is also alliteration. "This went to his strangeness by the standards of many in the neighborhood but not by my father's standards." This compares to the theme because not many people can see past how unusually normal some people are it did not get past Susie's father.