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
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Yellow-Handled Knife
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism, violence, and alcoholism.
Paperboy opens with the image of the yellow-handled knife, which, Victor reveals early on, has caused a stabbing. This back shadowing aims to draw the reader in, but it also highlights the knife’s importance to the text. The yellow-handled knife symbolizes the relative power of the characters. Since the first page of the novel directly references an event involving the knife, the text anticipates the knife’s appearance as Victor looks back on the events that built up to the stabbing. When Ara T. has the knife, Victor is relatively powerless and is unable to get it back. However, by the end of the narrative, Mam’s reclamation of the knife from Ara T. and her subsequent stabbing of him function both as a satisfying resolution to the earlier setup and as a way of transferring power from Ara T. back to Victor and Mam.
Outsiders
All of the major characters in Paperboy are outsiders in their dominant culture to some extent, and this becomes a major motif in the novel. Mam and Ara T. are outsiders in Victor’s primarily white neighborhood due to their Blackness, Victor perceives himself as an outsider because of his stutter, Mr. Spiro is eccentric and seemingly likes solitude, and Mrs. Worthington is placed outside the dominant culture due to her drinking and personal difficulties. Vawter uses this motif to point out and refute the oppressive parts of society.
Part of Victor’s arc throughout the novel involves his increasing acceptance of his outsider status. Early on, he views his speech disorder as a crutch that will inevitably affect every interaction he has; by contrast, at the end of the novel, Victor hasn’t cured his stutter, but rather has learned to accept it as a feature of his identity rather than a problem to be solved.
The Dollar Bill Pieces
Like the yellow-handled knife, the pieces of the dollar bill Mr. Spiro gives Victor function in the narrative on multiple levels. On the one hand, they create tension for the reader: The text is elusive about why Mr. Spiro is giving the dollar bill pieces to Victor and what they might mean. However, the dollar bill also symbolizes Victor’s perceptions of himself. In the beginning of the text, Victor feels like he isn’t whole. His speech disorder has made him feel like he is different than the other children around him. However, over the course of the novel, he gains more and more self-confidence. The words that Mr. Spiro has written on the pieces describe different aspects of Victor’s personality. Putting the bill together at the end of the story shows Victor’s process of putting his own personality together into a cohesive whole. The dollar bill reflects Victor’s job earning money, representing Independence in Childhood as Victor grows and learns more about himself.
