Thirteen Reasons Why

Jay Asher’s book, Thirteen Reasons Why is based around the suicide of Hannah Baker. When Hannah Baker committed suicide, she left behind tapes giving thirteen reasons why she killed herself. Those reasons were thirteen people who had made a harmful impact on her life. The tapes were left for those people to listen to and pass to the next person. In this book, Jay Asher showed that overlooking details about people cause bad consequences for many people. In the first tape, Justin Foley’s tape, Hannah told her story from her first experiences of living in her new town. She explained her happiness and her friendships. Towards the middle of the tape, Jay Asher included a description of Hannah’s perfect day. As readers, we know it was perfect for

Halfway through the tapes, Hannah said, “At the end of class, Mrs. Bradley passed out a flyer called The Warning Signs of a Suicidal Individual. Guess what was right up there in the top five? ‘A sudden change in appearance.’ I tugged on the ends of my newly cropped hair. Huh. Who knew I was so predictable?” (321). One of the signs was a sudden change of appearance. Hannah, who recently cut her hair, is noticing that she is having signs of becoming a suicidal teen, and nobody is noticing them. Even though the signs were right in front of the students and the teachers, none of them truly recognized them. If overlooking means that you fail to notice something, then the other people in Hannah’s school were overlooking the fact that she was showing signs of a suicidal teen. to Hannah because no one noticed when she was suicidal, even when it became obvious. Certainly it could be said that people didn’t notice what was going on in Hannah’s life because they just didn’t pay attention to Hannah or didn’t realize she changed the way she looked. While this is a good point, because the students certainly didn’t acknowledge her newly cropped hair, it fails to account for the fact that Hannah got a lot of attention, even though it was negative, but people noticed small things about her. However, they could not notice her