The Lovely Bones: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Susie describes Mr. Harvey’s nightly dreams of buildings in the three months following her murder. He dreams of thatched-roof dwellings in Yugoslavia, wooden stave churches in Norway, and the Church of the Transfiguration from Vologda in Russia. Mr. Harvey’s dream of the Church is his favorite, and it is the one he has on the night of Susie’s murder. These are “still” dreams, and he experiences them for a long while, until another kind of dream—“not still” dreams of women and children—returns to him.

Susie can see the whole of Mr. Harvey’s life, all the way back to his childhood. Mr. Harvey, as a child in his mother’s arms, sorts colored glass with his father, a former jeweler. As a child, when others asked Mr. Harvey what his father did, he answered “a builder,” leaving out the fact that his father built “shacks of broken glass and old wood.”

When the “not still” dreams come back, Mr. Harvey turns to his father’s old sketchbooks, trying to “steep himself” in pictures of other places and worlds. In trying to ward off the not still dreams, Harvey begins to dream of his mother the last time he had seen her. She was dressed in white, running through a field on the side of the road after a fight in the New Mexico desert—George Harvey’s father had forced his mother out of the car, and she had run away without stopping. Harvey and his father had watched the road, and Mr. Harvey’s father explained that his mother was gone and would not be coming back.