I was sent here because of a boy. His name was Reeve Maxfield, and I loved him and then he died, and almost a year passed and no one knew what to do with me.
-- Narrator (Prologue paragraph 1)

Importance: Jam opens her story by telling the reader why she believes she was sent to The Wooden Barn.

And the thing that amazes me the most, the thing I keep obsessing about, is this: If I hadn’t lost Reeve, and if I hadn’t been sent away to that boarding school, and if I hadn’t been one of five ‘emotionally fragile, highly intelligent’ teenagers in Special Topics in English, whose lives had been destroyed in five different ways, then I would never have known about Belzhar.
-- Narrator (Prologue paragraph 13)

Importance: At the end of her introduction to the novel Jam notes that if she hadn’t been sent to The Wooden Barn she would never have know...