Hannah Baker’s Suicide Reflected in Jay Asher’s 13 Reasons Why

This study examines how are Hannah Baker’s personality and suicide reflected in Jay Asher’s 13 Reasons Why novel. To discover the answer, it utilizes new criticism and Klonsky and May’s three-step theory which involves a combination of psychological pain and hopelessness, absence of connectedness, and capacity to suicide. The descriptive qualitative method is used as the method of this study.This research discovers that Hannah Baker is a typically friendly and delicate new girl. Eventually, she faces unsympathetic conflicts with her peers that make her get reserved. As a result, it increases her vulnerability to committing suicide.Furthermore, this research discovers that the first step associated with the suicide ideation emerged stemming from her combined psychache and hopelessness as a response to being ridiculed, false rumors, betrayal, and juvenile delinquencies: traffic offenses, thefts, the trespass of privacy, physical and sexual assaults committed by the minor characters. Her suicide ideation is considered strong as a response to the next step which is the absence of connectedness: her parents, Clay Jensen, Mr. Porter, school, home, and poems that she considers not her safe havens anymore. In the last step, her capacity is sufficient to commit suicide with a practical contributing factor. A handful of pills is eventually chosen as her means to suicide. Understanding the stages of suicide ideation-to-action is noteworthy to determine what efforts should be taken to avoid the ideation proceeding to a suicide attempt.