The Lovely Bones Character Analysis Essay

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How does a third person omniscient narrator affect a story? The Lovely Bones, a novel by Alice Sebold, is about a girl named Susie who is raped and killed. After being killed, Susie goes off to Heaven and we are shown how she adapts to living in heaven. We see her killer continue to live among her family and friends, and we see her family fall apart. Susie knows what everyone does and thinks, and she shares this with the reader. Knowing all the character's thoughts allows for a finetune analyzation of the book. In addition, it serves as a way for us to understand certain characters better. Furthermore, we can piece together the bigger picture. By narrating in this unique way, we are able to explore the story deeper than if otherwise, and as a result we are able to have a better analyzation of a meaningful book.
Analyzing a text is critical, because it supplies a deeper knowledge about the book. It is often difficult, since you are rarely given the whole picture. You’re often missing somebody’s thoughts or feelings that make everything else make more sense. Yet in The Lovely Bones, we have an omniscient narrator, also known as someone all-knowing.The narrator explains what everyone is thinking and doing, including her sister, her killer, and her mother and father’s faltering relationship starting with …show more content…

By taking a step back from a text and putting together everything that we already know, we can find out things we didn't know before. For instance, when Susie is viewing Mr. Harvey’s underground structure in the beginning of the book, she looks at things inside of the place and she learns more things about Mr. Harvey just from that. “There was a mirror on the shelf, and a razor and shaving cream. I thought that was odd. Wouldn't he do that at home? ” (Sebold, 11) Susie already knew that Mr. Harvey was bizarre, but by making simple observations she noticed much more and even found out he was a