Thesis For Thirteen Reasons Why

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There are always two sides to a story. Jay Asher shows an example of this in “Thirteen reasons why” when we see Hannah and Clay’s thoughts on the events that connect them. In the novel a girl named Hannah Baker commits suicide, but leaves tapes to show the the people who hurt her the slow decaying of her emotions. Through the thoughts of Clay and the voice of Hannah on the tapes the reader is left with the truth of a mystery, that the characters have yet to figure out. The reader connects to Clay because he had heard about everything but was unable to really help Hannah during her slow descent into depression. Asher structures the story to switch between Hannah and Clay in the events of the story, in order to show how this affected them based …show more content…

As an illustration for this, in the text it says “I screamed that word over and over again, Why? Why Zach…. I heard about that, Hannah flipping out for no apparent reason… but there was a reason” (Asher 169). With the font changes such as this one, Asher makes it obvious who is talking, but after a while he makes their personalities known through their words. To where you wouldn’t need the font change because of how different they are. Although, there are other times when their words collide and you couldn’t tell which character is which without it. For this evidence however Clay says Hannah’s name and Hannah is already describing one of her reasons to the listener. This little change for the writing can really emphasize the character identity to the …show more content…

The author conveys this in the story by saying in the text “Definitely beats my first kiss, seventh grade, Andrea Williams” (Asher 27). Basically the author is just adding to Clay’s character, and just showing how the use of the tapes is affecting all of the listeners in some way. Whether it’s bringing back memories of that day that changed Hannah’s life. Or if it’s just reminding them of something that happened to change their life. In this case Clay is reminded of both since in the quote he talks of a past experience, but later in the story when his tape comes up we see his side of the story. Even though he didn’t really do anything to hurt Hannah, he was still apart of it. This really emphasis what the tapes represent, and their