I just read Sebold's novel once again with your question (as well as many others) in mind. I can firmly tell you that this quote is most certainly NOT in the book. However, there is certainly a discussion of love in some form. Ray Singh has a romantic love for Susie. There is also agape love in the novel itself. Susie's father feels that kind of unconditional love for his daughter. This is probably best revealed on page 279:
His devotion to me had made me know again and again that I had been beloved. In the warm light of my father's love I had remained Susie Salmon--a girl with my whole life in front of me. (279)
Ironically, the focus of the novel is not particularly upon these two types of love, but on the "lovely bones" that Susie herself connects to the title:
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections--sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent--that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life. (Sebold 320)
In other words, just as bones connect a body together the events that happened after Susie's death created a kind of "body" of its own that Susie was allowed to watch. Seeing this beautiful "body" of events, this new world without Susie living in it, was what let Susie "let go" so-to-speak. Unfortunately, her life was sacrificed in the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment