You can either kill yourself, or you can make your suicide an event in and of itself. Hannah Baker decided to do the latter. Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of Why I Become Emotionally Attached And Angry At Fictional Characters. Today we will talk about Jay Asher's 2007 New York Times Bestseller, 13 Reasons Why. It stood at the best seller list for 90 weeks straight, which is the amount of time you'll need to finish reading this post. It's probably one of the longest posts I've ever written on here.
Let's get to it:
Spoiler Alert.
Hannah Baker was a high schooler who just committed suicide, but not before creating 7 cassette tapes, each tape telling a story of the people in her life that pushed her over the edge. Thus giving 13 reasons why she chose to end her life. The tape will then be privately passed from one person to another, until all 13 people on the tape have listened. It was written from the point of view of Clay Jensen, a shy acquaintance of Hannah's, and the book revolves around the eerie tape about Hannah's secret life. The accounts were all very detailed as Hannah seemed like a born raconteur so I'm going to just wrap it up in a nutshell. Hannah was the attractive new girl at school, which meant that boys were all over her. But after one innocuous kiss with a boy who exaggerated the incident, Hannah became the resident slut. That snowballed and more boys started approaching her solely to get with her, and she didn't have many girl friends that were faithful to her either. What really pushed her over the edge though, was the fact that she saw her drunk ex-best friend get raped and she did nothing to stop it, plus she was partially responsible for the death of her senior. She felt like no one truly cared for her and that her life was beyond her control, as her promiscuous repute superseded her true character. So she popped some pills, but not before leaving 7 tapes for the people who ruined her life.
To be honest, this was a pretty easy read. My friend suggested this and I thought it was such an interesting story that I had to have it right then and there. So I downloaded the pdf and read the book within the span of 3.5 hours, so this was no Anna Karenina.
The basic storyline is incredibly unique. Leaving behind cassette tapes for every perpetrator to listen to? That's some next level CIA shit. But I'm very iffy about stories being executed properly. You can have a great idea, but it's the little details that amount to it being a great book. This novel did not live up to its potential. This book could be great and heartwarming, but it left me empty and angry at Hannah and the author for not creating a more well-rounded character.
I was waiting for the climax, for an event to shake the life out of Hannah and push her down to the abyss of clinical depression, but it never happened. The events in her life weren't significantly scarring, and yet she treated them as if they were irreformable. She was a teenager going through mild bullying, avoidable sexual harassment (honestly, Hannah, you're not the first person to be touched without consent, that's called being a woman), and just the general feeling of inadequacy that most teenagers have.
It wasn't that Hannah was weak for committing suicide, it's that she was weak for ending her life with problems that will pass once she moves away to college. She refused to get better and pushed herself further away from people and was an all-around unlikeable character.
Alright, so a boy slapped your ass because you were voted the 'best ass in sophomore year', whoop dee fucking doo. She respected her body and knew that the advances from sleazy high schoolers should be rejected, but she gave up so easily, and that pissed me off. Girls will never stop being treated as objects and tools for sex, and that's something we have to live with for a very long time. The fact that Hannah couldn't even stand being slightly manhandled and used that as a reason to kill herself? Not justified. That's like quitting school because you have to write essays.
So I thought, well, maybe Hannah is going to go through tougher shit, things that she, as a teenage girl, could not handle. Nope.
She witnessed her extremely intoxicated best friend get raped in a room, and Hannah hid away in a closet, watching the event unfold, crying. Are you... are you fucking kidding me, Hannah Baker? Your ex-best friend was raped and you're the one committing suicide. No, wait, your ex-best friend was raped and you still have the fucking audacity to give her these tapes to blame her for your death. You must be kidding me.
Oh, it doesn't stop there. When her friend, Jenny, hit a stop sign with her car and drove off, the absent sign resulted in two accidents, one ending in the death of a person. So the fact that Jenny inadvertently killed a man somehow made Hannah feel responsible for the deaths. That doesn't make sense. Hannah thought that she should've reported the fallen stop sign to the police but she didn't, so she felt responsible for the accidents. But Jenny was the one who should feel bad. She was behind the wheel, and maybe she did feel bad for it. Whoa but then fucking Hannah Baker had to put Jenny on the cassette tapes and blame her for her suicide. Which is basically like going, "Hi Jenny, you accidentally killed another man. How dare you. It made me kill myself because now I feel bad. How dare you."
Hannah Baker you are an incredibly selfish individual.
There are smaller events that made her tick. One of which was that she wrote a poem and shared it to this guy at school, and the guy published the poem in the school paper without her consent. But he published it anonymously. Which made Hannah Baker angry, because, I don't fucking know. It was anonymous! This isn't even something to kill yourself over, like are you even serious right now? You'd blame someone for your death because he published your poem? How petty are you?
Another incident involved an invitation to join the after party with Courtney and Bryce in a hot tub. Both Courtney and Bryce have backstabbed Hannah; Courtney by spreading false rumors, and Bryce by raping her ex-best friend. But Hannah was all just like, "yeah let me jump into this hot tub in my underwear with these two people who have pretty much ruined my life and my ex-best friend's life by raping her." Smart move, Baker. It seems like you actually want to be emotionally scarred.
So obviously something went down. Bryce started touching Hannah, and Courtney pretended she didn't see and left the tub. Hannah didn't say no, she didn't fight, she just looked away as Bryce fingered her. Excuse me, Hannah fucking Baker. Bryce was a total asshole, no doubt, and should be in jail for rape, but the fact that you didn't fight. that you did not (I am so angry at a fictional character right now) hit him or run or do something, just made me sick to my stomach. You cannot let something bad happen to you and blame someone else for it. I am not victim blaming, however I am blaming someone if they don't even fucking attempt to get out of a bad situation. It's like if you walk into a snake's pit, get bitten, and then you blame the snakes for your injury. Don't get into the snake's pit in the first place, smartass.
I know that Hannah might've been already 'broken' and hence she couldn't didn't want to fight off Bryce, but come on. If she feels like her life is that bad, why would she put herself in a situation that would exacerbate the perils of her problems? She voluntarily went inside a hot tub with a rapist. WHAT DO YOU EXPECT?
Hannah Baker was weak. She never once stood up for herself, denied a rumor, or tried to turn her life around. She walked along the path of darkness because she wanted to, and refused to look around for greener pastures, even though they were all around her. She is not a character I would root for nor admire for courage. She is a character I look down upon for her unjustified suicide.
Now I hear you ask, "are there justified suicides?" Yes. To me, there are. There are people who have gone through so much sadness and irreversible pain that the only escape is death. I do not condone suicide, but if I understood the circumstances, I would understand why they would opt to end their lives. But this? These superficial problems by a girl who seem to just looooooooooove to roam about in the Cave of Sadness? I have no empathy. This isn't depression. Read the book and you'll realize this is a girl unwilling to change for the better simply because she didn't fucking want to. I felt like the character needed more explanation (there was only like, a sentence related to her parents. I didn't know anything about her family home) for me to be more emotionally connected to her.
Hey, I might be wrong. I might be reading into this too much, or too little. But I found this character to be completely idiotic and has nothing of value to offer. I give this book a 5/10. Props for the original plot, deduct huge marks for creating a character I simply cannot root for nor understand.
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