We Were Liars

The Sinclairs are a patriarchal family: Harris (Grandad) owns all the wealth, and his children survive by virtue of trust funds he has set up for them. This kind of situation used to be almost universal in human life. Men controlled property, and women served men in various ways, as wives or servants or workers. The defects of patriarchy are obvious in the novel. Harris Sinclair has too much power over others, and he abuses it. He taunts and manipulates his daughters, offering them things and then taking them away. He wants to be praised for how good he is, yet he behaves badly. It takes Cady's act of violence for him to wake up and change his ways.

We Were Liars offers a lesson in responsibility. It portrays a world that is defective and that inspires anger in characters such as Gat and Cady, whom we come to admire. That world hurts Gat in turn hurts Cady, as she cares for him. She feels righteous in her anger at her family, and she feels like a heroine, as she puts it, in striking out at them. Cady believes there’s better way to harm a world that thrives on emblems of wealth than by destroying one of its primary emblems. The decision to burn Clairmont makes sense to the Liars, given all that happens to Cady and Gat in the novel. Cady's values are abused; instead of kindness in her family, she sees greed and a perverse devotion to "normality." Gat encounters exclusion and racism. But Cady's act harms people she loves. She must ultimately take responsibility for that, and she demonstrates great courage by doing so with unflinching honesty. Yet the novel also points a finger at her family and especially at the aunts and her grandfather, as it was their bad behavior that set the fuse.

We Were Liars depicts a world of incredible wealth. Cady’s family owns their own island with three houses on it. Grandad has enough money to be able to consider donating enough to Harvard University so that a new student center, named in honor of him, can be built. The novel depicts a clash of values between a younger generation, which does not take the quest for wealth as seriously as their parents, and an older generation, whose lives have been poisoned by possessing so much wealth. The family wealth is not entirely legitimate, either. Gat and Cady destroy the ivory figurines that Tipper and Harris got in China, and Cady reminds us that ivory is illegal. But that did not matter to Harris, so long as his trophy wife felt good and looked good. The story of the ivory suggests that there might be something illicit about the Harris's wealth. It has deleterious effects that he and other owners of great wealth do not acknowledge. 

The novel very cleverly gives us the impression that certain characters live twice. Despite having died, they live on and communicate with those who survived. However, death is irrevocable; it cannot be overcome. We do not return for a second chance. Life happens only once, and that is one of the painful things Cady must come to terms with. She took life—that most precious thing we all possess—away from people she loved. However, by having them live on in her imagination, she also endows them with a new kind of life in her memory, where they will live "[f]orever."