Revealing Lying Behavior of the Main Character of 13 Reasons Why (Season 2) TV Series through Violated Maxims

Bhattacharjee (2017) mentions that sometimes people lie to inflate their image and to cover up bad behavior. The capacity for dishonesty is essential as the need to trust others, which is ironically puzzling to detect. Finally, it would be enunciated that lie is human. Similar to Bhattacharjee, DePaulo et al., (1996) state that people lie continually about their feelings, actions, plans, whereabouts, achievements, and knowledge. This phenomenon fascinates the researchers to carefully probe it in one of TV series entitled 13 Reasons Why (Season 2). In this TV series, the main character, Clay Jansen seems to do some lies due to his capacity in court as the witness of Hannah’s suicide. He indeed does not want to engage in the trial but Hannah’s spirit is haunted him to uncover the case. Employing Cooperative Principles (CP) proposed by Grice (1975) and premises of motivations (instrumental, relational, and identity) of deception by Buller and Burgoon (1996), this investigation is conducted to reveal lying behavior of the main character and his motivations of doing it. Under descriptive qualitative method, the analysis results that all four maxims are violated. It also reveals that Clay employs three lie motivations which disclose his lying behavior. Instrumental motivation is applied to avoid punishment and to protect source of information. Then, relational motivation is exploited to redirect the social interaction and to protect interlocutors’ feeling. Last, identity motivation is operated to protect his private feeling and to project a favorable image.