Claire Elise Murray

Ashley Bowman

Honors English

1/14/14                                 Thirteen Reasons Why- Suspense Factor

                 “Everything...affects everything” - Thirteen Reasons Why

              Throughout this book, I felt that the way Jay Asher built up the suspense was superb. The begging of the story starts with Clay Jenson, the main character, sending the box of tapes he received from Hannah Baker the girl who recently committed suicide to the next name on the list that she created. At this point as a reader, you are very confused. You have no prior knowledge about the tapes, what they said or even why there was a list of names. This first seen creates an immense amount of suspense. You want to know what these tapes are about and how this story links back to this first scene.

            Once Clay ships the tapes, that story starts with when Clay first received the tapes. The story also explains about how Clay received the tapes and what he knew about what previously happened to Hannah. After we know a little about what happened, Clay secretly steals a Walkman from his friend so he could listen to the tapes. The first cassette plays and Hannah introduces herself along with all of Clay’s thoughts and actions while listening. Then she gets into names of thirteen people that influenced her decision to end her life, and since Clay received them, he was on the list as well.

         

   Clay is known by friends and schoolmates to be a very nice, intelligent person. The level of suspense builds every different cassette that Clay changes because for most people including me, I am assuming want to know where Clay fits into this story. I feel like that was the main area of suspense throughout Thirteen Reasons Why. Another large area of suspension comes when Hannah is describing the stories of experiences that she had with other people. For me while reading these situations would be very hard to put the book down because it really pulled me in and made me want to keep reading.