Essay on Category 1. Prompt ~ The Lovely Bones 3

Contemporarily, people like happy endings, whether riding off into the sunset, achieving fame and/or fortune, finding lasting/ true love, and so forth.  Voice an opinion on why such endings are so wanted, if they actually are, and what such conclusions hold for you as audience/readers.  Relate the novel’s ending: is it a “happily ever after”?  Why/ why not?  It is satisfactory and fulfilling in your views?  Why/why not?  What three words would you use to describe it?

I believe that the major driving forces which makes people crave for happy endings are empathy and hope. Happy endings are strongly desired by the majority of readers: survey of book readers showed that 41% of respondents favored books with happy ending, and only 2.2% expressed a preference for books with sad ending; most of the people who preferred books with sad ending were teens under 16 ”“ 8.6% of them expressed a preference for sad endings, while among people aged 41-65 only 1.1% had similar preference (Cowen n.d.). This statistics, in my opinion, clearly shows why people really need happy endings: in the course of life they have to meet a lot of pain, grief and sorrow, and the more they meet it, the greater they want to hope and believe in the better ending. Readers dwell in the imaginary worlds to get new experiences and feelings, and they carry on these feelings to real life. These feelings create a reserve of endurance and optimism in people, and for our generation which is living in the age of changes such emotional reserve is needed more than ever.

Of course, the notion of happy ending is different for different people, and the ending of “The lovely bones” can be perceived as good or bad, depending on how the reader perceived the characters and the plot. In my opinion, the final of the novel is a true happy ending, full of light and wise feelings. The ending of this novel created a vision of the constant flow of life in my imagination, and also raised questions about the laws of karma and the universal justice. Overall, all characters were put by Alice Sebold to their places: Harvey was killed by an icicle (and it might be highly possible that Susie also contributed to that), Harvey’s potential victim was saved, and Susie is ready to move on, while her place in the world is filled by another lovely girl, Abigail Susanne. The wheel of life makes another round: Susie’s relatives can heal their pain by caring about the newborn girl, and Susie has reached content in her soul and is ready to move further. The ending reminds of the saying on the Solomon’s ring: “everything passes, and this will pass”. Three words which I would use to describe the ending of the novel are reviving, inspiring and philosophic.



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