38 pages • 1 hour read
Gary PaulsenLiar, Liar
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Foreword-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
Fourteen-year-old Kevin Spencer is an excellent liar. He’s proud of this skill because he sees the need to lie as a universal inevitability, necessary for the greater good and making life easier and happier for everyone. The secret to his success at lying is that he tells people exactly what they want to hear. He tells his parents that school’s going great, he agrees with whatever opinion his friends have already expressed, and he convinces his teachers he understands the math or reading comprehension skills they’re trying to teach him. Kevin is such a skilled liar that he’s never been caught in a lie—until his life goes “from zero to crap in a week” after he gets carried away with his lies (4).
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Good Lie Furthers Your Agenda”
Kevin’s 8th grade social studies teacher just assigned a class project in which students must work with a partner to research and present a topic related to government. Mr. Crosby has assigned Kevin to work with Katie Knowles, an ambitious overachiever whom Kevin can’t stand. They end up choosing a topic Kevin finds so boring he doesn’t even try to remember it: an analysis of census data for underserved populations, especially relating to educational grants and future public service.
On Monday, Kevin tells Katie he has a horrible, untreatable disease— “chronic, degenerative, relapsing-remitting inflammobetigoitis” (5)—to get out of working with her. He lists a catalog of symptoms, which he learned thanks to his friend JonPaul’s hypochondria. He often helps JonPaul search through medical websites about whatever illness he believes he has. He throws in a few symptoms he got from drug commercials, too.
Katie responds with sympathy and offers to do most of the project herself. Kevin realizes she’s probably relieved she won’t have to work with someone who might slow her down or cramp her style. His lie benefits her too, he decides; it’s a win-win situation.
Chapter 2 Summary: “A Good Lie Can Support Any Plan”
Later that same day, Kevin sees Tina Zabinski in the hallway at school and, though he’s known her since preschool, he suddenly falls madly in love with her. He’s sure that he has what it takes to be the world’s best boyfriend. However, when he tries to talk to her, he finds he’s sweating profusely and unable to say anything. After an awkward few moments, JonPaul grabs his arm and pulls him toward the cafeteria, eager for lunch.
Kevin, who’s never had a girlfriend before, obsesses about Tina all afternoon. When he gets home after school, he looks over his large collection of books about military history and strategy, a topic of which he never tires. He decides to apply that knowledge to a plan to make Tina his girlfriend, framing it as a sort of military maneuver. He may have to fall back on lying to succeed, but in the context of military terminology, it’s really just employing subterfuge.
Chapter 3 Summary: “A Good Lie Begins with an Element of the Truth”
Kevin has a 15-year-old brother named Daniel and a 16-year-old sister named Sarah. The three of them have shared custody of a car their Auntie Buzz gifted them. Though only Sarah has a driver’s license, Kevin feels since they’re supposed to share the car, Sarah should be willing to drive him where he wants to go as often as she uses the car for her own needs. Lately, he feels Sarah and Daniel have been hogging the car and ignoring his perspective about it, so he decides to pit them against each other. He manipulates Daniel into thinking Sarah must be shoplifting to afford all the new clothes she has. He adds fuel to the fire by suggesting their parents found out but are still letting her drive the car. Later, Kevin tells Sarah that Daniel called her selfish. A fight between Daniel and Sarah ensues, and their mom suspends their car use for a week.
After Kevin’s mom deals with his older siblings, Kevin hears her complain under her breath about their dad never being home. His mom has been working a lot of hours lately too, but his dad is almost always away on business trips, so he’s not even home in the evenings. The rest of the family doesn’t spend much time together either or talk to each other as much as they once did. One thing they do have in common is a love of books, which are always available thanks to their mom’s job at a bookstore.
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Good Lie Can be Used More Than Once”
On Tuesday, Kevin decides his classes are getting in the way of what he calls “Operation Tina” (38). He has four of his eight classes with her. The other four, he decides, are a distraction. He needs more time to focus on Tina and ways to impress her. First, he tells his Spanish teacher he’s just become a student manager of the wrestling team. Señora Lucia gives him permission to miss Spanish class for a few days to help the team get ready for tournaments. This lie works so well that he decides to use similar ones for the other three classes, but he tailors them to match each teacher’s interests and sympathies. He tells his art teacher he’s working on the crew for the school musical. He gets excused from gym by telling the coach he’ll be writing for the sports section of the student newspaper. He gets out of math class by saying he’s joining the student government as an alternate representative. Kevin tells himself he’s increasing the value of his education by challenging himself. After all, getting straight A’s won’t be quite so easy if he’s missing classes.
Chapter 5 Summary: “A Good Lie Has an Outcome Advantageous to All Parties”
Kevin actually does attend the student government meeting once he realizes Tina is involved. Tina’s best friend, Connie Shaw, is also in the student government, as is Kevin’s friend, JonPaul. Kevin decides getting in with Tina’s friends is a good way to get Tina to like him. He adjusts his military strategy to gathering intel and “studying the secondary targets in order to acquire data about the main objective” (45). He pretends to be passionate about the same things as Connie and agrees to serve on her committee to present ideas to the school board. Meanwhile, JonPaul and Tina are sitting on the stage with the other student government officers. Kevin gets jealous when he sees JonPaul talking to Tina, even though he hasn’t told his friend about his feelings for Tina yet.
Foreword-Chapter 5 Analysis
Gary Paulsen sets Kevin’s story in a nondescript city and an average school, imbuing the narrative with a universal quality. Most moral conventions, like the taboo against lying, are rooted in what is beneficial to society—the things that help humans survive and thrive as a group. In the initial stage of his character arc, Kevin chooses his own desires over other people’s right to the truth. In the context of a Freudian conflict between id and ego, Kevin chooses selfish behavior over ethical behavior. This conflict is one all children must navigate as they mature and learn to be part of society, underscoring the story’s universal resonance.
The Spencer siblings’ shared car offers one example of how family dynamics influence Kevin’s choices and perspective. His perception of the situation differs from his sister’s:
Sarah’s definition of share was that she drove our/her car everywhere she wanted, whenever she wanted, and made us beg for rides. […] Daniel’s and my definition of share was that, because we were part owners, she should have driven us everywhere we wanted to go, every time we wanted to go anywhere (27).
In this description Kevin frames Daniel and Sarah’s perspectives as identical to his own—motivated by their own self-interest, allowing him to believe his lies and manipulations are justified.
Paulsen utilizes the book’s chapter titles to map the book’s central conflicts and the arc of Kevin’s character transformation. Early chapter titles reiterate Kevin’s beliefs about the benefits of lying. Before everything suddenly starts to go wrong over the course of a week, Kevin’s never gotten in trouble for lying. He’s only experienced positive outcomes as a result of telling lies. Chapter titles like “A Good Lie Has an Outcome Advantageous to All Parties” and “Good Lies Make the World Go Round” echo how beneficial he believes lying is (45, 60). It’s not until Chapter 10— “A Good Lie Can Turn on You” (89)—that these titles begin to reflect the negative consequences of lying, paralleling Kevin’s first experiences of them. By acting as thematic summations throughout the book, the chapter titles provide a map of The Consequences of Lying and the Importance of Honesty in Kevin’s life.
Paulsen’s story leans more on character and narrative voice than on plot to explore its central themes. Kevin tells the story from a first-person perspective. As a protagonist, he’s intelligent, charismatic, and incredibly observant. At times he displays impressive levels of insight and self-awareness. At other times, his confidence gets the better of him, especially in the midst of the changes that accompany adolescence. When Kevin suddenly falls in love with Tina, it’s as if he’s seeing her in a brand-new light after knowing her since preschool: “All that prettiness and blond hair and soft voice and she’s civic-minded, too. How could I have missed how perfect she was all these years?” (46-47). The new changes, experiences, and emotions that Kevin experiences as he enters adolescence manifest in an elevated confidence that adds humor to the narrative tone—“It’s not that I thought highly of myself, it’s that I really am a great guy” (24).
Author Gary Paulsen uses several techniques to emulate the voice of a teenage narrator. In a recurring literary device, he puts periods between each word in a sentence—adding a staccato cadence that adds emphasis and mimics teen vernacular. For example, after revealing his effort to get out of working on the social studies partner project, Kevin notes: “Cannot. Deal. With. Katie” (5). Text-savvy characters tend to write in ways meant to mimic speech, since technology now enables them to communicate in writing at the speed of a spoken conversation. Kevin himself observes: “Katie is smarter than a NASA computer, but wuh-hay too trusting for her own good” (12). Paulsen’s uses of wuh-hay instead of way adds onomatopoeic emphasis to the statement which standard text would otherwise lack. Along with using the modes of speech and thought that characterize a teenage boy, Paulsen also taps into characteristic teen attitudes and modes of expression in his characterization of Kevin. In response to the overly broad guidelines for choosing a social studies research topic, Kevin thinks: “Thanks, Mr. Crosby, way to narrow the scope” (6). Kevin’s informal, intimate narrative style reveals his motivations, feelings, and beliefs, and highlights the internal process of Personal Growth and the Development of Integrity.
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