13 Reasons Why

I just finished reading "13 Reasons Why" by Jay Asher.  The main character of this book was Clay. Clay is this really sweet guy who liked a girl named Hannah Baker. In the beginning of the story you find out that Hannah has killed herself, but no one knows why. Then a couple weeks after her suicide Clay receives a box of 7 cassette tapes and on these Hannah explains why she killed herself and lists every person who had something to do with it. Clay doesn’t know what he did to hurt her so he’s really worried about listening to the tapes. I think the resolution of this story would be Clay finding his closure about Hannah’s death.

When Clay finds out that you only get the tapes if you had something to do with her death he gets really upset. I think that it would be terrible to get an audio suicide note from someone who you were close to. I felt so bad for Clay because he has to get through all of this pain of listening to how people hurt Hannah.  The tapes really traumatize him because he was so close to Hannah. Can you imagine listening to how people hurt someone you cared about? I think I would go crazy. Especially that you’re hearing about it after you can’t do anything to help the person.

Clay originally couldn’t get any closure because he never had a chance to say goodbye to her. He had kissed her at a party and then she got really upset and wouldn’t explain to him why. He had wanted to stay and help her but she told him to leave and he did. He felt guilty for leaving because he thought he should’ve stayed and helped her. I think that if he had stayed maybe she would’ve been able to calm down and not go to such extreme measures as killing herself, but really it wasn’t his fault.  She had told him to leave and if he didn’t listen to her, even if he was trying to help, it might have pushed her over the edge even sooner.  That’s why Clay needed the original closure.

When Clay first began listening to the tapes he was trying to figure out if it was a joke or some kind of mistake.  He doesn’t know why he’s on the tapes.  The stress of listening to the tapes and waiting for his part to come up is really stressing him out. Hannah says in the beginning of the tapes “And you lucky number 13, you can take the tapes straight to hell.” Clay gets more and more stressed as the tapes go on because he’s hearing about these terrible things and he’s worried that he might be number 13. Between these two things he’s getting more and more confused and scared.

Throughout the story Clay is getting more and more upset as he hears what Hannah has been through. By the end he is a nervous wreck. Clay originally needed help to let go of Hannah and stop thinking about her suicide. Even though the tapes hurt him they overall help him understand why she did it and it helped him realize that he wasn’t to blame. I think that in the story the tapes are what help him find closure but throughout the story it seems as if they are what’s bothering him in the first place. I can’t even imagine how a person like Clay would feel if they had to hear something like this. But it’s nice to know that its helps them in the end.