In The Lovely Bones by Alice Seabold, Susie Salmon is the story’s protagonist. Her personality is intertwined with all of the narrative’s occurrences. Additionally, she is perhaps the most prominent character in this story in comparison to others. Besides being the protagonist, she serves as an all-encompassing (omniscient) narrator, recounting all of the story’s incidents. Susie is a round character because her personality transforms when she dies significantly.
To begin, Susie was brutally raped and murdered by Mr. Harvey. As expected, she is supposed to loathe the man for stealing her life at a young age. However, Susie does the unexpected; she respects the person responsible for her death. During her recollection of the incident that led to her death, she explains how she initially hesitated to speak with Mr. Harvey. However, since the man had close ties with her family and had interacted with her father, she respected him and answered his questions. Moreover, she confessed to feeling sympathetic for Harvey because he was single and had never been married before.
“I imagined he was lonely. We had read about men like him in health class. Men who never married and ate frozen meals every night and were so afraid of rejection that they didn’t even own pets. I felt sorry for him.” (p. 11)
This personality attribute is indeed connected to her most outwardly lovable characteristic. Susie had learned to develop a sense of empathy for everyone, including those who had crossed her path, despite being only 13.
Susie never considered her grandma to be a good influence throughout her time on earth. Everything she believed was that her grandma was a narrow-minded heavy drinker. Susie grows fonder of her grandma as she observes her from the spiritual realm. Particularly, grandma has been her family’s pillar of joy and humor after her death, noting that her alcoholic nature was part of her endearing character.
“I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was part of what made her who she was.” (p. 316)
It appears that Susie has more sense of empathy for Len Fenerman than previous expressions of love. She comes to terms with the fact that Len did not intend to harm her or her household in the first place. On the contrary, Len comes out as a forlorn individual who had unsuccessfully attempted to adore her mother.
“I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comprehend. In that, I could see, he was like me.” (p. 273)
Based on these accounts, one can surmise that Susie’s strength of character keeps growing in the afterworld. She has a lot of empathy and can comprehend other people’s actions and decisions without passing judgment. Susie has maintained her love for her family despite passing away. Knowing what other people are thinking makes it easier for Susie to empathize with them since she judges their actions with greater caution. To this end, since her passing, Susie has evolved as a dynamic and round character who uses sound judgment to understand everything that affects her.