Hyper-reality in Sebold's The Lovely Bones

Shahram Kiaei,Masoumeh Safdari

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijclts.v.2n.2p.53

Shahram Kiaei, Masoumeh Safdari

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijclts.v.2n.2p.53

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Abstract

Heaven and hell are good places for creating the plot of a story because no one has ever seen these lands. They are hyper-real places because we imagine them like what we see on earth and can never imagine them as they are. Their reality is based on what we read about them in the holy books. By using Jean Baudrillad's ideas of "Hyper-reality" and "Simulacra and Simulation," the present study attempts to consider the concept of hyper-reality in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (2002) in which the main character starts her life on heaven. She tries to indicate heaven as a human creation a place like earth. The writer depicts heaven as an earthly landscape and makes the readers believe that whatever they read about heaven is really true and this fact puts more emphasis on the hyper-reality of heaven in the novel. Through the story heaven is simulated as a copy of a real religious one. Thus, the heaven of the novel is a hyper-reality because as it is a copy of religious one but it has no origin. We mean the things and places as amusement parks, different American cars, magic ice creams and newspapers have no place in the real religious heaven that we read about in different holy books such as The Bible and The Holy Quran.

Highlights

This article aims at the clarification of the reality of heaven, simulacra and simulation of heaven as well as the concept of Disneyland and God in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones
In which heaven is shown as a representation of American culture and society, the landscape of it is related to the imagination of each characters and every person's heaven is different from others
I wanted to go there into the cornflower blue of Crayola, the royal, the turquoise, the sky" (2002 34). In this paragraph the matter of Inbetween becomes clearer when she lives in a hyper-real world of heaven and her mother lives on earth as a real world "I reach my hand across the Inbetween and take the hand of that young lonely mother in mine" (150). Sayer believes that this world is disconnected from the sphere of human experience (2008 73), it is true because we never experience living in such world and we see this fact in this novel that the heaven which we read about it in this book is made by Susie's imagination and it is really disconnected from her experiences because she never experiences such living in the past and she does not know anything about it, that's why when she enters to heaven tries to decorates it with all the things that she likes not with the things that exist in the real religious heaven

Summary

Introduction

This article aims at the clarification of the reality of heaven, simulacra and simulation of heaven as well as the concept of Disneyland and God in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. He notes hyper-reality goes further than astonishing the symbol which represents the real; it wants to create a symbol that represents something which does not exist (1994 3) In particular he suggests that "The world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more" (3). Mark Sayer believes, as we live in the world of reality, we do not live in the hyper-real world because it does not really exist and this is the problem. Considering a false icon for God is another example of simulacra, Richard Lane states that, one of Baudrillard's examples is related to a religious image and the danger of "monotheistic", God being dispersed via a multitude of icons or simulacra In such a development, the true God would be replaced by a series of simulated gods (2001 88-89). The only thing that is existed is the simulacrum and even the God himself become simulacrum (1994 5)

Reality and Hyper-reality of Heaven

Simulation of Heaven

Disneyland

Conclusion