The Lovely Bones

Recently, I was watching the movie "The Lovely Bones," an adaptation from the novel of the same name by Alice Sebold. I had read the novel in middle school, and watched the movie before coming to Ireland. In the film, 14-year old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is abducted and murdered by her neighbor, George Harvey. Her father and then her younger sister attempt to find her killer, and eventually succeed. While I was watching the film, though, I noticed a parallel between a scene in the movie and a scene from "An Encounter" in Dubliners.

In "The Lovely Bones", Susie is walking home late from a film club meeting when she comes across Mr. Harvey. He has built something in the cornfield, he says, and wants her to take a look at it. He lures her into a hatch that he has built into the ground, and murders her.

This encounter between Mr. Harvey and Susie reminded me of the scene in Joyce's "An Encounter," when the narrator and Mahoney meet the old man during their day exploring Dublin. The reader gets the sense that the man they meet is not to be trusted, just as the audience has a bad feeling about the character of Mr. Harvey in "The Lovely Bones." While the old man in the story might have turned out harmless- as readers we don't know, because the boys leave before the man is finished with his monologue- he may very well have been a bad person, like in "The Lovely Bones."

I found the parallels between two seemingly totally unrelated medias really interesting. Without reading Joyce in class, I don't think I would've thought to connect a very commercial film to his work.