Self-Deception and Rationalization Theme Analysis

Because many of the characters in The Leavers trick themselves into ignoring their own shortcomings, the novel itself showcases how eager people often are to delude themselves. In particular, Ko illuminates the process of self-deception that characters like Deming use to rationalize their actions, even when their justifications are quite obviously out of touch with reality. This dynamic is a large part of why Deming has such a hard time dealing with his gambling addiction. Even though he knows that “temptations can lead to relapses,” he consistently puts himself in situations that inevitably lead to gambling, though he tells himself every step of the way that he’s not about to start betting again. Rather than acknowledging his path toward relapse, he focuses only on the present, since this makes it easier for him to deny the fact that he’s about to do something he knows he shouldn’t. Providing this portrait of self-deception, Ko proves that the most successful forms of denial occur when a person avoids looking at the broader narrative of his or her actions, instead adopting a shortsighted viewpoint that enables him or her to rationalize one thing at a time. In turn, the author suggests that self-deception is often comprised of little more than a series of small but consecutive rationalizations.

When Deming relapses for the first time since gambling away $10,000 of borrowed money, his reversion is incremental. Having just gotten into an argument with his parents after a party in Manhattan, he walks to a bar and takes out his phone. Although he acts at first like he’s just mindlessly scrolling, he soon pulls up information he once wrote down about an “underground” poker club with a $200 buy-in. However, he deletes this note after looking at it, thereby convincing himself—in a superficial way—that he isn’t about to succumb to his desires. Once he’s outside the bar, he tells himself that he’s going to walk to where his parents are staying. On the way, though, he stops at an ATM. “His finger hovered over the button that said $50, but he hit $500, the bulk of his account, and watched the bills shoot out,” Ko writes. At this point, he makes his way to the poker club, having finally given himself over to what he’d clearly decided to do when he first left his parents. Calling attention to this step-by-step process of self-deception, Ko shows readers what it looks like to maintain a guise of ignorance (and even innocence) while straying from what one knows is right.

As Deming embarks on a downward spiral, he begins to feel as if he no longer has control over his actions. Having gotten this far, he doesn’t even try to stop himself from gambling. “He was frightened by how much he was about to fuck up, by his lack of desire to stop himself, the rising anticipation at the prospect of falling down, failing harder, and going straight to the tilt; he’d known from the moment he left the bar exactly where he would end up,” Ko explains. This complete surrender to the whims of desire is exactly why Deming went out of his way to ignore his path toward relapse in the first place. If he’d acknowledged his plan from the beginning, he would have had to grapple with the decision. By breaking his descent into manageable stages, though, he was able to more easily rationalize his behavior. And now, just before he sits down at the poker table and loses $500, he makes one final rationalization, telling himself that he is powerless to turn away at this late juncture.

Ko makes sure to point out that people use various rationalizations to justify all kinds of things, not just relapses. By the end of the novel, even Deming recognizes the ways in which humans fixate on small matters that are easy to explain away. “Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days,” Ko writes. “Like Vivian’s belief that she had helped [Deming], [Polly] insisting she had looked for him [after her deportation], that she could forget about him because he was okay.” Going through the people in his life, Deming thinks about Vivian, who put him in foster care after his mother disappeared. This then makes him think about his mother’s attempt to justify the fact that she hardly tried to track him down after she was detained. These stories, Deming comes to understand, frequently fail to take into account the bigger picture. For instance, it’s possible that his mother really did look for him, but it’s rather obvious that her attempt to find him was half-hearted. Still, though, she ignores this fact in order to “get through” life without a guilty conscience. As such, readers witness the power of selective rationalization, which enables people to go on with their lives without holding themselves fully accountable for their own unflattering actions.