Lovely Bones Mr. Harvey Character Analysis

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Literature and Composition March 18, 2010 A Very Different Sort of Monster In the book, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Susie Salmon is an everyday teenager who has the unfortunate opportunity of coming across a monster in the cornfield, and never returns home. She becomes an unfortunate victim of Mr. Harvey’s lust for human life, and the book is mostly written from her viewpoint in the “in between”, which symbolizes where we may go when we die. Mr. Harvey is the most fascinating of serial killers, not a deranged bum on the streets or a drug-addled fiend that would kill for more practical reasons, but a man like most, from far away. Although he evolves and changes in many ways throughout the story, the power of Susie’s love for her family destroys him in the end. However, the evidence throughout the book explores Mr. Harvey’s evolution into a monster. His beginnings, eccentric habits, and interactions with the main characters in the book all have undercurrents of change,along with where his need arose in his lonely life. He appears a pitiful bachelor, but is quite the clever predator. Mr. Harvey experienced childhood trauma that may have contributed to his actions. At an impressionable young age, he was abandoned by his mother, which may have led to his choice of killing women and girls. As a child, “he would steep himself in the images of other places and other words, trying to love what he could not” (Sebold 97). He obviously witnessed some kind of family dysfunction that triggered a dissociative response from him, wishing he was someone else, or away from his current environment. Sebold suggests intense family arguments by saying, “…and his father and she had fought for the last time in the hot car outside of Truth and Consequences, New Mexico. He had forced her from the car”(97). His father’s abandonment of his mother when Mr. Harvey was at such a young

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