Breaking And Remodeling

As a representative of the American famous writer Alice Sebold,The Lovely Bones has attracted great attention of the readers all over the world as soon as it came out.This book tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Susie,who suffered from a serial murderer,and was raped,murdered and dismembered,as well as a series of changes that her death had brought to the living families.With the help of Susie’s spiritual perspective,all the readers can observe the behavior of whose family after losing her.Although the novel presents a tragic experience of a 14-year-old girl,it is filled with love and warmth from family and friends.The author has made a subtle description of the family and the friends after Susie’s death,presented the readers the whole experience of an original happy family fell apart for the eldest daughter’s death,and made a reunion out of the love between family members through the observation of the soul of Susie,which is the tribute to the great love between family members.The novel The Lovely Bones contains large elements of the Bible,which are in every aspect in the work.Such as characters,settings,narrative patterns,motifs and so on.In The Lovely Bones,Sebold uses the characters and settings in the Bible,such as Satan and Job,the Heaven and the Hell.The innocent Susie was seduced and killed by Harvey out of being polite.The place of the murder was like the Hell full of despair.After death,Susie’s soul came to the Heaven.Looking back at all the things in the world,she was furious.Finally,a strong belief in the love of his family was chosen and then Susie got her peace,just like Job,who suffered and was rewarded for his strong belief in God.Structurally,the author also uses the U-shaped narrative pattern:Eden—evildoing—suffering pain—repentance—salvation.Before Susie was killed,the Salmon family was in the happiness of Heaven.However,the whole family almost fell apart because of the pain of losing Susie after she was killed.In the end,the family got reunion out of the love for families,and they continued to move forward.Besides,Sebold made her new interpretations of the motifs of Paradise Lost,Journey,Forgiveness and Paradise Regained in the new historical environment.This paper uses the method of text analysis to analyze how Sebold uses and displaces the biblical archetypes in The Lovely Bones from the perspective of Frye’ s Biblical Archetypes.And then the present paper makes the following conclusions:the author gives the biblical prototype a new connotation in the new period,and has a deep grasp and insight of many aspects such as humanity,psychology and mental outlook.At the same time,the thesis shows the hope of the happy and harmony of the human society,which makes The Lovely Bones an attractive work with the warm personality.