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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.
This passage from Chapter 23 shows how much Susie has grown during her time in heaven. Although she cannot age in the way a living person does, her perspective evolves and matures. She comes to realize that bones are not just a symbol of death, but also a frame or skeleton for a life that had the potential to be lived (and to come to an end) differently. Her individual existence has been sacrificed, but new life has grown around that loss. This new kind of “body” is made up of the pieces that her death created in the world. With this insight, she understands that broken people and things can be rebuilt into something “magnificent” and beautiful.
Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
This passage concludes Chapter 14, an eventful one in The Lovely Bones. Lindsey breaks into Harvey’s house and finds a drawing of his constructed earthen hole, while an anguished Susie watches from heaven, summoning Harvey’s other victims to her as she aches to protect her sister. The murdered women and girls gather, sharing their stories. Susie joins them in sharing, and she is able to release some of her pain through the act of narrating. Not only does this scene suggest why she is narrating the novel, but it also stresses the importance of recognizing the quotidian facts of both evil and beauty. It is not possible to “contain” or erase what is horrible from the world, but it is possible to recognize this horror and acknowledge that it can emerge anywhere. This realization has parallels in other passages in which Susie indicates that monsters, like Harvey, are just men. To fully understand Earth, in other words, one must see both the flowers and the horrors.
Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would…turn it over….The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.
This brief description precedes the novel, like a prelude, and introduces one of the novel’s key symbols, dollhouses. Within the metaphorical dollhouse, just as in the snow globe, lies the illusion of safety and of an idyllic “nice life.” Within the snow globe, the penguin is completely protected from both danger and chance, but is also, at the same time, trapped and alone. His “life” mirrors Susie’s life in her imperfect version of heaven, where she feels lonely and mourns the loss of her life and the future it would have offered her. In this brief anecdote, as in the novel as a whole, The Lovely Bones suggests that being alive in an imperfect world is preferable to being alone in one that merely seems ideal.
