Thirteen Reasons Why and The Lovely Bones

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When two teenage girls die, many lives are affected as time passes. This is the case with Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones’ protagonist, Susie salmon and Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why’s protagonist, Hannah Baker. Both of them die at a young age, and the lives of the people they were close to change forever. The two novels can be seen and compared through the psychoanalytic lens by looking at the behaviours of people that were close to Susie and Hannah after the deaths of the two girls. Psychoanalytic theorists have expanded on Sigmund Freud’s work and believe that human behavior is deterministic, that people’s behaviours are based on their past experiences (Rubin). Both of these novels have a unique style of writing where both of the girls, though dead, are the ones that speak for most of the novel. Hannah Baker’s and Susie Salmon’s lives, before and after death can be seen through the psychoanalytic lens where both start to accept their fate as time passes. Thirteen Reasons Why’s Clay Jenson and The Lovely Bones’ Jack Salmon can both be seen through the psychoanalytic lens in the way they coped with the loses of Hannah Baker’s and Susie Salmon’s lives as years, or tapes pass. Ray Singh and Justin Foley were both the first kiss of Susie Salmon and Hannah Baker, respectively. How they reacted and dealt with their death can be compared through the psychoanalytic lens.
When Susie Salmon passed, she was terrified in the afterlife. She felt angry, that life is very unfair, and most of all she missed everyone she loved. Susie was still young and was not ready to let go of her family. “I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with...

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...’s father, Jack can be looked at and compared through the psychoanalytic lens in the way they both behaved at the deaths of Hannah and Susie. The first kisses of Susie Salmon and Hannah Baker, Ray Singh and Justin Foley can also be compared in the way they both acted and reacted to the deaths of the girls that they shared an intimate moment with. Life in unfair, and the two poor girls who die at a young age in the two novels learned that the hardest way possible.

Works Cited

Asher, Jay. Thirteen Reasons Why. New York: Razorbill, 2007. Print.
Rubin, Jeffery B. "The Real Oedipal Complex." Psychology Today. Jeffrey B. Rubin, Ph.D., 1 May 2012. Web. 31 Oct. 2013.
Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002. Print.
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Mr. Harvey in The Lovely Bones"Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc.,11 Dec. 2008. Web. 31 Oct. 2013.

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