44 pages • 1 hour read
Vince VawterPaperboy
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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BetaChapters 15-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
When Victor arrives at Mr. Spiro’s house, he sees a duffel bag on the floor with the words “SS Patrick Henry” printed on the side. Mr. Spiro says that he’s leaving soon and will be back in the fall. Victor, thinking that Mr. Spiro is the only person he can ask about his father, asks to return to Mr. Spiro’s house when he’s finished with his collection run. When Victor gets to Mrs. Worthington’s house, he finds it empty and an envelope taped to the door. The envelope contains $5, covering what the Worthingtons owe, and a short note asking to cancel the newspaper. Victor wonders whether Mrs. Worthington had more to say to him than was contained in the note. Disturbed, Victor heads home, forgetting about the rest of his collections.
Chapter 16 Summary
At his house, Victor remembers the rest of the collections, and he tells Mam he’s getting change to cover Mr. Spiro’s collection as well as the bags that Ara T. stole. Victor goes to his room and discovers that it’s been ransacked, with all his money stolen. He calls Mam up to his room, and the two of them both recognize the telltale lingering scent of Ara T. Mam discovers that Ara T. got into the room because Victor had left a ladder leaning against the house when he was retrieving a ball from his roof. Mam leaves to confront Ara T. and tells Victor to stay at Rat’s house. Instead of going to his friend’s place, Victor secretly follows Mam to Ara T.’s shed. He hears Mam calling for Ara T. and pounding on his door. Frustrated that Ara T. isn’t responding, Mam pulls his door off the hinges and heads inside herself, but she finds the shed empty. Mam comes back outside and discovers that Victor disobeyed her. Mam asks Victor if he has a carfare, and Victor gives her the $5 bill that Mrs. Worthington left. On the bus, Victor notices that Mam sits at the front without seeming to be worried about the consequences as before. Surprising Victor again, Mam takes a pinch of snuff and assures him that they will get his things back from Ara T.
Chapter 17 Summary
Mam takes Victor to a street called Vance, which is in a section of Memphis he’s never been to before. Mam instructs Victor to stay close to her and ducks down an alley to go to a building where a bunch of junkmen’s carts are parked. Finding Ara T.’s cart, Mam tells Victor to take her pocketbook and hide inside of the cart while she pursues some sort of plan. However, unable to breathe under the tarp, Victor eventually climbs out of the cart and heads toward the building that Mam entered. Victor enters a smokey lounge where music is playing, and he sees his things—including the money that Mr. Spiro gave him and the picture of Victor and Mam at the zoo—on an empty table. Victor then sees Ara T. holding Mam by her neck against the wall. A man tries to hit Ara T. with a chair, but Ara T. takes it from him, and then he threatens Mam, saying that he’s going to kill her just like he killed her brother. Victor, realizing that he is the only one who is going to try to save Mam, picks up a bottle by the neck and hurls it like a baseball at Ara T., shouting his name as he does so without stuttering. Ara T. drops Mam but comes for Victor, saying, “Looks like I’m gonna breaks me a white boy’s neck now” (190). Ara T. puts his hands around Victor’s throat, but Mam attacks him with the yellow-handled knife that she managed to get earlier from Ara T. Mam manages to stab Ara T. in the arm and get Victor away from him. When he tries to attack them again, he is stopped by Big Sack, who tells him that the fight is done. Big Sack wraps Ara T.’s arm up to stop the bleeding and says that he needs to go to a place called Hatty’s to get stitched up. Mam and Victor gather the things that Ara T. stole and leave. On the way home, Mam tells Victor that they’ll talk over what happened in the morning.
Chapter 18 Summary
At six o’clock the next morning, Victor awakens to a knock at the front door. He figures that it must be the police, and not wanting to speak with them right away, he goes back to sleep. Later, Mam wakes him up and tells him that the knock was from a man on a bicycle who wanted to pay for the papers he had purchased. Mam sits Victor down at the table to discuss the previous night’s events and tells him that they’re “going to talk about it this one time and then never again for all [their] days” (198). Mam then tells Victor the story of how she knows Ara T. They’d grown up together in the same part of Mississippi, along with Big Sack. One day, Mam’s brother was found dead between Mam’s and Ara T.’s houses; her father always suspected that Ara T. killed him. When Victor asks if she’s going to tell the police what Ara T. did to her family, she explains “how her people clean[] up their own messes and [don’t] depend on white people and their police” (200). Mam also tells Victor that Ara T. was the person who attacked her and gave her the facial injuries. Remembering the stabbing, Victor starts to cry, and Mam tells him that he did a good job saving her by throwing the bottle.
Chapter 19 Summary
Victor opens the envelope that Mr. Spiro gave Mam and finds the fourth dollar piece, with the word “seeker” on it, as well as the money that Mr. Spiro owed for the newspaper. Victor also reads a note left in the envelope, in which Mr. Spiro promises to continue talking to him after he returns from vacation. Rat, returning from his cousins’, tells Victor stories about life on the farm. The two of them walk the route together, and Victor explains that Mr. Spiro and Mrs. Worthington have asked for their papers to be paused. At the end of the route, Rat asks Victor if he wants to toss a ball around, but Victor turns him down, thinking to himself that he doesn’t know how to tell Rat about all that happened with the route while he was gone. Back home, Victor’s mother and father both try to connect with him—his mother through pralines and his father through money—but Victor is unexcited by both. Feeling guilty, he decides to throw a ball around with his father. As they play, Victor realizes that his father is the man who raised him, and he owes him so much more than he does to his mysterious birth father.
Chapter 20 Summary
At the end of the summer, Victor enters the seventh grade. He’s spent the summer avoiding Ara T.’s alley and hanging out with Rat, who has a girlfriend now. Victor has also started to spend time with the boy he always saw on the paper route through the window watching TV, whom Victor discovers always watches TV because he is trying to learn to read lips. In addition, Victor only saw Mrs. Worthington one additional time before the end of the summer, holding hands with her husband in public. Mam encourages Victor to think about his future, and he becomes interested in writing through reading the newspaper. Rat’s mother comes over to the house and reads a news story to Victor’s mother about the integration of the Little Rock school system in Arkansas. Victor’s mother complains that the schools in Memphis will be integrated soon, and Victor feels sorry for her for her ignorance. Rat’s mother says they’re considering moving so that Rat will only go to fully white schools, and Victor wonders why anyone would want that.
In class at school, the teacher makes everyone introduce themselves. Remembering the people he met and the lessons he learned over the summer, Victor introduces himself, stuttering as usual, but unlike as usual, he doesn’t feel self-conscious about it. Victor explains that he’s going to save the pages he’d written, explaining the story of the paper route, and ends by saying, “Words in the air blow away as soon as you say them but words on paper last forever” (222).
Chapters 15-20 Analysis
The final third of Paperboy focuses less on the story of the paper route and more on the story of Ara T. and his thefts. Throughout the previous segments, Victor has felt positioned in his society as an outsider—unable to communicate and without very many close companions. This notion is flipped on its head when Mam takes him to the lounge to retrieve his money from Ara T. In this scene, Victor has now become more of an outsider than he was in his own neighborhood, as a white child in a Black neighborhood. Vawter hence suggests that Victor has not understood his privilege as an insider in his white neighborhood until now. This scene explores both The Acceleration of the Civil Rights Movement as well as The Treatment of People With Speech Disorders through this outsider motif. In flipping Victor’s understanding of his social rejection on its head, Victor now has a greater understanding of the discomfort that Mam and Ara T. feel in primarily white neighborhoods.
In the lounge, Victor intervenes to protect Mam from Ara T. This is the culmination of his character arc; Victor’s growth toward greater independence and learning to stand up for himself allows him to protect the person he loves the most. Ara T.’s characterization fully develops in this section, as well. Earlier on in the narrative, it isn’t clear whether Mam has a reason for telling Victor to stay away from Ara T. or whether it’s prejudice stemming from Ara T.’s job as a junkman. Ara T. demonstrates that he doesn’t have Victor’s best interests in mind, like Mr. Spiro and Mam do, when he mocks Victor for being unable to pronounce the word “knife.” The tendencies that earlier were only hinted at become explicit in the scene in the lounge when Ara T. chokes Mam against the wall and then attacks Victor, forcing Mam to stab him. The desperation that Ara T. feels at the end of the novel reveals the extent of his antagonism.
The yellow-handled knife, missing for most of the narrative, makes a reappearance at the end. As well as a symbol of the various power dynamics in the novel, the knife symbolizes Victor’s independence. At the beginning of the novel, the knife allows him to sever the bundles of newspapers and start his new job, and at the end of the novel, Victor’s reclamation of the knife is the pinnacle of his newfound confidence. The knife, then, symbolizes a character’s power. When Mam uses it to stab Ara T. in the arm, she is reclaiming that power for herself, extracting herself and Victor from a dangerous situation. This also reflects the theme of The Acceleration of the Civil Rights Movement, as Mam’s reclamation of power anticipates the power that Black people would reclaim for themselves over the course of the 1960s.
The end of the novel shows Victor in a new, productive mental space compared to the beginning. At the start of the summer, Victor is overwhelmed by even the prospect of social interaction and having to confront his summer. By the end, he’s able to speak in front of the whole class and tells them that he has a stutter, demonstrating an immense change of attitude compared to his anxiety at the beginning. This newfound confidence also emerges in other ways: Victor decides that he doesn’t even like baseball all that much and wants to become a reporter. He also disagrees explicitly when Rat’s mother and his mother speak about school integration. This arc presents Victor as more ready to handle the challenges of the world, which in no small part is due to the efforts of Mr. Spiro and Mam, each of whom taught him different lessons about morals and what he values in life.
The dollar pieces that Mr. Spiro hands Victor reinforce this concept. The dollar is a single thing torn into multiple parts, and Victor’s job is to reassemble them. However, Mr. Spiro has also written a word on each piece: “student,” “servant,” “seller,” and “seeker.” Though Mr. Spiro never directly explains the metaphorical meaning of those words, Victor interprets them as referring to the various aspects of his own personality. In receiving the whole dollar and putting it together toward the end of the novel, Victor is also assembling the pieces of himself that were broken apart because of his insecurities and trauma. Each of the pieces, too, has to be earned; Mr. Spiro doesn’t give them to Victor all at once. In doing so, Victor comes to understand the effort required in putting them all back together and how they all function as smaller parts of the larger whole of himself.
The final lines of the novel focus on Victor’s new understanding of the value of writing. When telling his mother about his day at school, Victor says, “s-It’s more important what I say than how s-s-s-s-I say it” (220). This notion forms the pivot point for his character—Victor’s understanding of the power of writing, thought, and analysis helps him to understand that his speech disorder will only rule his life if he lets it. The final pages of the novel, then, are a process of letting go, which is reinforced when the major characters of the novel leave Victor’s life. Mrs. Worthington, Mr. Spiro, and Rat have all assumed a less central role in Victor’s life at the end of the novel compared to the beginning; however, Victor’s relationships with other characters, like Mam and the boy he saw watching TV, have strengthened. Victor’s new confidence and independence have taught him the value of certain friendships, and in pursuing those friendships, Victor is on the path to growing up.
