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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Parts and Wholes
Susie’s body is cut into pieces, and her family falls to pieces as a result. Structurally, pieces and wholes are used to represent how pieces come together to form wholes in the novel. For example, chapters are often comprised of disparate paragraphs that sometimes seem disjointed, yet still create a compelling whole. Rhetorical figures that relate parts and wholes in nuanced ways, like synecdoche and metonymy, appear regularly throughout the novel. Susie’s elbow is a gruesome example of synecdoche because it’s a piece of her body that signifies that the whole is dead. Less gruesomely, Jack calls Abigail “Ocean Eyes,” his term of endearment treating one part of her body as a representation of who she is.
Other pieces or parts and the wholes they relate to are more subjective. The mementoes that Harvey keeps, such as Susie’s keystone charm or the wedding rings from other victims, are pieces that symbolize the whole experience of ending a life.
Likewise, broken objects offer surprising ways for reforming wholes. When Jack smashes the ships in bottles that he built, Susie projects her face onto the glass fragments from heaven, leading Jack to realize he should make more time for Buckley. Just as crimes are solved by putting together clues (or not, as in this novel), so too does the reconstruction of pieces yield astonishing new creations, as when Susie talks about her murder as “lovely bones.” New ways of recognizing friends, as in the Monopoly game, or the union of two halves of a heart, as in Samuel’s gift to Lindsey, appear throughout the novel as reminders that parts can always come together to engineer a whole.
Surveillance
Characters in The Lovely Bones watch one another constantly. Throughout the novel, this motif represents fear, worry, and mistrust. This motif is first established when Susie, who wanted to be a photographer, discovers a new side of her mother, Abigail, while photographing her unawares. Sometimes the act of surveillance comes from a place of love or desire to protect, as when Susie watches her family and friends from heaven or when Lindsey stakes out Harvey’s house to find evidence of his guilt. But even in those instances where surveillance is an act of love, it still reflects fear. The novel’s various characters are only able to move on with their lives once they feel it’s safe to stop surveilling others.
Notably, surveillance motivated by love is often juxtaposed against nefarious monitoring. George Harvey surveilles his victims as he plots to kill them. He does this to Susie and, later, to her sister Lindsey. When he returns to Norristown many years after Susie’s murder, Harvey watches Lindsey through his house’s windows. But his fears multiply as he spies on Lindsey, and he ultimately flees town again.
Jack also surveilles Harvey, though Harvey is less concerned with Jack. Jack’s surveillance, which stems from his mistrust of Harvey, leads him to self-sabotage when he attacks Brian Nelson in the cornfield after mistaking him for Harvey. While surveillance creates the illusion of control, characters in the novel must learn to relinquish control in order to move on from grief and live a fuller life.
Escape
Susie can’t escape George Harvey physically, but she aims to escape the consequences of her murder emotionally by maturing and experiencing new things. The prospect of escape appears often in the novel and is experienced by many of its characters. First, as he senses suspicion, Harvey flees Norristown after Susie’s murder. He further aims to escape the consequences of his actions by taking measures to disguise himself or to blend in. Harvey also uses lies to escape suspicion from the police when questioned.
At home, Abigail cannot withstand the pressure of grief and escapes to California to numb the pain of being so close to her loss as well as to the family that was already challenging her independence.
Later, Susie escapes the confines of heaven to resolve her unmet need to know physical intimacy in a safe and loving way. Once this is satisfied, she no longer feels the need to escape.
Likewise, Abigail returns following Jack’s heart attack and realizes that no one can escape the consequences of their circumstances. Those characters who learn this lesson are able to heal, but others, like Harvey, spend their lives pursuing escape. Poetically, as Harvey dies at the end of the book, he is still in the act of fleeing justice.
