Paperboy

“I always picked my way around words and sounds in sentences like I walked around broken bottles and dog turds in alleys.”

At the beginning of the novel, Victor refers to speaking with negative language: Words are obstacles to get around, rather than methods of communication. Vawter uses the setting of “alleys,” places where the more sinister events of the novel take place, as a metaphor for the negativity that Victor feels about speech. However, as the novel continues, Victor becomes more comfortable with himself and his identity as someone with a speech disorder.

“I knew I would get a sharp knife back. Ara T showed Rat and me in the alley one time how he could cut a tin can into a ribbon with a knife he had sharpened. That can looked like the peel of an apple after he got through with it.”

Victor has just handed his yellow-handled knife, which he values highly, to Ara T. to sharpen. Victor consistently demonstrates trust in individuals whom he shouldn’t trust; the “tin can cut into a ribbon” foreshadows the violence of which Ara T. is capable, and Vawter juxtaposes the delicate description of “the peel of an apple” with the sharp knife to suggest that Victor is a vulnerable figure next to Ara T.

“He was puffing on his crooked cigarette and trying to make like I wasn’t there. s-s-s-s-Do you s-s-s-s-have it? Told you, boy. Can’t have it till you call its name proper.”

Vawter emulates Victor’s stutter to enhance the verisimilitude of the text. Victor realizes that Ara T. is not going to easily give him his knife back. The symbol of the yellow-handled knife now takes on a new meaning in the narrative. Rather than just being a symbol of Victor’s independence, its removal turns it into a symbol of his power being stolen.

“Mr. Spiro stepped down on the porch from his doorway.

Speech pathology is certainly not my field of expertise but it is an interesting subject that I’ve read a tad about of late. My guess is that you are also in control of your speech when you sing. Is that correct?”

Mr. Spiro is characterized as an eccentric intellectual, and that characterization is embodied in his diction since he distils something that the novel has hitherto approached through Victor’s lived experience into an academic term, “speech pathology.” Early on, Victor is impressed with Mr. Spiro’s way of speaking, and it is part of what draws him closer. Mr. Spiro’s love of words serves as a direct contrast to Victor’s fear of speaking them.

“Why do s-s-s-s-people who can talk right waste so s-s-s-s-many words saying s-s-s-s-nothing?”

This statement from Victor reinforces his characterization. Instead of wishing to speak more, he wishes it was more socially acceptable to speak less—and therefore, he would be more comfortable when speaking to strangers.

“The Something I Was Coming Down With was the same thing I had been coming down with every minute of my talking life.”

Victor’s anxiety over speaking climaxes when he vomits at a restaurant. While his parents think that he’s sick, Victor knows that he vomited because of his speech disorder. He mocks his parents by referring to “The Something I Was Coming Down With”—they are capitalized with a false grandeur—highlighting his increasing independence from their perspectives. This reinforces the distance between the parents and Victor and how his parents are failing to connect with him and understand him.

“I kept hoping the pain would make me forget about stuttering but it never did. I decided it didn’t make much sense to keep sticking myself and I got tired of always having a bloody hand when class was over. You can’t replace one hurt with another one. You just end up with double hurts.”

One of Victor’s methods of coping with stuttering is to inflict pain on himself, which distracts him from his anxiety about speaking (which usually makes his stuttering worse). In realizing the harm that he is causing to himself, Victor is demonstrating growth and further maturity. Victor’s self-harm is an analogy for the oppression that he encounters in society, which compounds hurt by penalizing difference.

“Then Mr. Spiro said one of those things that seemed important without me knowing why.

One of the most beautiful happenstances of life is the person doing precisely what he knows is intended for him. Unfortunately a rare situation.”

Mr. Spiro’s role as a parental figure means that Victor takes his words to heart. In this passage, Mr. Spiro’s worldview—and acceptance of ambiguity—becomes important to Victor as the lessons he needs to learn to gain independence and maturity. Vawter does not use quotation marks to denote dialogue in the novel, reflecting Victor’s fear of speech. The lack of quotation marks represents a more ideal world for Victor in which dialogue is more fluid and there are fewer fearsome barriers to speech.

“When I wanted to I could pester Mam to beat the band but it was clear I wasn’t going to get any more talking out of her. When Mam said Leave It Be that was what you did and you’d best not waste any more of her time.”

Mam is characterized as reserved and competent. In this passage, Victor sees her injuries and suspects Ara T.; however, Mam refuses to give him any details. At this point in the story, Victor has yet to realize his own independence, and despite his worry for Mam, he respects her wishes. The capitalization of her words reflects his reverence for her.

“I started wondering if I might have enough guts to check out his secret place to see if I could find my knife. I got a heavy weight inside my stomach when I thought about trying to sneak into Ara T’s hideout. It was like the feeling I got in class when I knew my name was going to be called to say something.”

This passage directly links Victor’s stutter with other anxiety-creating events in his life through this feeling in his gut. This foreshadows his eventual shift into someone reclaiming his confidence to speak—just as Victor steels himself to check out Ara T.’s “secret place,” he also pushes past his anxiety to talk about himself in front of the class.

“There was no yellow-handle knife but I recognized the big chrome headlight that had been on my old bicycle. It had to be mine because my old Schwinn was the only kind of bicycle around that had a headlight that big and shiny.”

Victor treats Ara T. with a mixture of fascination and wariness. Ara T. reflects Victor’s outsider status, which gives Victor instant sympathy for him. However, in this scene, Victor begins to realize the extent of Ara T.’s maliciousness, as there are other things of Victor’s in Ara T.’s shack that he didn’t even know he’d stolen. Nevertheless, the fact that Ara T. must resort to stealing Victor’s “big and shiny” headlight suggests that Victor has more power in their dynamic than he realizes; he has the privilege and resources to own such an item.

“When I got the fourth word I was going to cellophane-tape all the pieces together and have a full dollar bill. I would always keep it in my billfold and never spend it because I knew the words were somehow more important than money.”

The dollar pieces Mr. Spiro gives to Victor symbolize the fractured identity that Victor feels due to his speech disorder. Victor is excited to put the pieces back together; on a direct level, he’s excited to deepen his relationship with Mr. Spiro, but he also wants to be able to put the broken pieces of himself back together.

“I decided I could stand my ground too. If there was anything good about being a kid who stutters it’s that sometimes people felt sorry for me because they thought I had a simple mind and they did things for me they wouldn’t do for somebody else.”

This moment marks the first time that Victor uses his stutter to complete a task, rather than just being embarrassed by it. In doing so, Victor reclaims some of his power over the racist photographer, and his bond with Mam is deepened. This also foreshadows later events during which Victor takes other pro-civil rights stances. Vawter suggests that solidarity between oppressed groups is part of The Acceleration of the Civil Rights Movement.

“I picked up a good-sized throwing rock on the ground and started after him. I got a feel of the weight of the rock in my hand. I picked out a spot on the back of his head where I could bust him.”

Part of Victor’s characterization is his sense of powerlessness and frustration. Frequently, within the text, Victor reacts to bullying by first trying to argue his case and then, once his stuttering starts, attacking the bully out of frustration. Vawter writes this moment intimately with attention to details such as the feel of the rock and the small spot on Willie’s head, aiming to draw the reader into Victor’s perspective.

“I walked a block up Bellevue to a newspaper rack and stuffed in all the coins I had in my pocket. I didn’t have enough money to cover the fifteen newspapers I took out. I looked around to make sure nobody saw me taking out such a big stack.”

This passage demonstrates an important aspect of Victor’s characterization: his unwillingness to accept help. Rather than talk to the newspaper and risk having to communicate with his stutter, he instead spends his own money to replace the newspapers that Willie stole. Victor’s character arc is one of increasing confidence, which, later on, is shown to include the confidence to ask for help when needed.

“I went over to slick-haired Willie who was folding his papers and stuck my bundle label in his face.

That’s mine.

I said it in a loud voice to cut down on my chances of stuttering. I spread my feet a little and was ready to take whatever he had to offer. Willie surprised me. He looked at me and gave me a half of a smile.

Take it easy, man. Everything’s copacetic.”

Having seen Victor stand up for himself the day before, Willie, to Victor’s surprise, now treats him with respect and deference. However, the narrative suggests that Wille’s respect isn’t because Victor almost threw a rock but because he is now demonstrating a confidence that he’d previously lacked. Vawter represents this confidence through Victor’s spread feet as he attempts to occupy a larger physical space.

“I tried to keep myself from looking too down in the dumps because it was plain to see that Mr. Spiro was excited about his trip and all his sevens. But covering up my feelings when something got sprung on me was another thing I wasn’t very good at. He stood in the middle of the room studying me and patting his face with a white towel he had pulled out of his bag.”

Though Victor has gained increasing independence over the course of the narrative, he still feels dependent on certain adults in his life for support, primarily Mam and Mr. Spiro. This passage highlights his character arc; at the end of the novel, rather than expressing sadness that Mr. Spiro left, Victor instead expresses excitement for his return.

“And he was going away on a towboat for more adventures and I was stuck in this hot stove of a city with only Rat who would tell about what a great time he had on the farm and how many dirt-clod fights he had with his cousins and how he wished I had been there to help him.”

A feeling that Victor frequently deals with in Paperboy is resentment. At times, such as in this passage, Victor expresses resentment at the hand he was dealt in life—instead of going on vacation, he is instead forced to work a summer job that’s difficult for him due to his speech disorder. By the end of the novel, Victor realizes the benefits that he does have compared to other people—particularly in regard to Mam and the burgeoning civil rights movement. The metaphor of the “hot stove” for the summer weather underscores the oppression taking place in the city that he learns about throughout the novel.

“Some of the signs on the stores were lettered in a bad hand with the words misspelled. When we got to the corner of Vance and Orleans Mam made sure I knew her rules in this part of town.

No matter what, Little Man, you stay close. If I tell you something, there won’t be any disobeying. You hear me?”

Throughout the novel, Victor is a white person in a white neighborhood. In this section, he gets firsthand experience of the differences between his neighborhood and a Black neighborhood, represented by the poor lettering of the signs, which suggests civic neglect due to racist policies. Mam ceases to be the outsider in this setting, and she teaches Victor how to carry himself.

“[S]-s-s-s-Will you tell the s-s-s-s-police what Ara T did to your brother?

Mam explained how her people cleaned up their own messes and didn’t depend on white people and their police. She said her people had always done it that way in Mississippi and then in Memphis and it always worked out best like that.”

Before this point, Mam has been unwilling to discuss the racial tensions of their time with Victor. However, after the confrontation with Ara T., Mam treats Victor more like an adult, and this passage is the first time in the text that the two of them explicitly address the differing systems of justice for Black and white people in the South. This characterizes Victor as well-meaning but naïve since he is privileged enough to believe that the police will help, while Mam sees them as a threatening force.

“I asked her how she knew my yellow-handle knife was in Ara T’s coat pocket. She said she had felt the Lord himself move her to the knife with a sure hand and she knew what had to be done.

Where’s the s-s-s-s-knife now?

Buried so deep the Hounds of Hell can’t dig it up.”

Throughout the novel, the yellow-handled knife symbolizes power for the person who possesses it. However, Mam has gotten rid of this symbol of power. Afterward, Victor must make his own way, without relying on the knife to feel stable. This suggests that Victor has developed as a character and stepped into an inherent power. Mam uses visceral language (“Hounds of Hell”) to describe the location of the knife, suggesting a traumatic response to the violent power structures that maintain hierarchies.

“I found my cellophane tape in another drawer and taped the dollar bill to make it whole. The four pieces of the dollar bill fit together perfectly. I put it in under a flap in my billfold that was supposed to be a secret compartment. Most billfolds had them so it wasn’t much of a secret anymore.”

Just as the symbol of the yellow-handled knife has reached narrative completion, so has the symbol of the dollar bill. The dollar bill represents Victor self-conception. By taping it together and putting it in his wallet, Victor is taking control of himself and defining who he is concretely for others. His realization that the secret compartment “[isn’t] much of a secret anymore” suggests that he is beginning to grow out of childhood games, too.

“I read the letter three times. I knew Mr. Spiro was trying to give me a clue to the four words on the dollar bill. Mr. Spiro’s leaving felt better because he had left me something to work on and because he told me when he would be coming back. I also liked that he talked about the Soul because I was going to spend a lot of time thinking about that.”

In this penultimate chapter, Victor’s arc toward further self-confidence is fully realized. Earlier, he was extremely worried about Mr. Spiro leaving because he didn’t want to be abandoned. Now, Victor is secure enough in who he is that he can accept Mr. Spiro leaving with grace.