Fantasy Spaces and Magical Realism in The Lovely Bones Oliver Bevan 12th Grade

Sebold’s employment of Susie as our dead homodiegetic narrator allows for a fantastical view into characters’ personal spaces when they are alone, a technique that could not occur through a live narrator. As part of Susie’s newfound maturity in death, something common in ghosts of the fantastical genre such as those in A Christmas Carol who guide Scrooge, she now understands how other characters rely on fantasy spaces to escape from the pressure they face in 1970s America. Hence, the exploitation of magical realism here, as Susie watches characters alone, actually helps Sebold to communicate her very real and human message of acceptance.

In chapter five, Jack’s struggle with society’s expectations of him as a father is highlighted through the fantasy space of his ‘den’, in which Susie’s ghost appears. The masculine dynamic verb in ‘he smashed that one first’, along with the simple syntax and ordinal adverb ‘first’ which sound as though this is systematic and expected of him, indicate the pressure Jack faces in grief as a man whose role in 1970s suburbia was to support his family, financially and emotionally. However, after Susie casts her face in the glass, Jack reveals his vulnerability, as though Susie has allowed him to do...