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.
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The Acceleration of the Civil Rights Movement
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and violence.
In the background to the events of Paperboy is the beginning of the civil rights movement, which slowly grew throughout the 1950s before its explosion in the 1960s. The year that this story takes place, 1959, was a hinge in the history of the movement. Earlier in the 1950s, activists had won important victories, including mandated school integration and the desegregation of bussing. However, these changes took years to implement and were resisted heavily by the states that the Supreme Court required to integrate. The Memphis of 1959 is not yet integrated, and Black characters such as Mam are forced to sit at the back of the bus when alone and cannot go to the zoo without a white person accompanying them.
The 11-year-old Victor, a white child, is not very aware, at the beginning of the novel, about the difficulties faced by Black people in his city. However, through his interactions with Ara T., his neighbors, and Mam over the course of the summer, Victor comes to understand the unfairness of Jim Crow laws and the mistreatment of Black people at the hands of the government. By depicting the movement through the eyes of a white child, the novel explores the impact that the movement had on white citizens. Being a child, Victor is not responsible for the oppression of Black people in the United States; however, he still benefits from societal assumptions about him as a white person. By positioning Victor as a relative innocent, the narrative also makes him the reader’s surrogate—when Victor learns about the civil rights movement, so might a reader who is unaware of the history already.
Victor’s increasing anger with the treatment of Mam, and his desire to rebel against the system, also positions him as the moral voice of the book. When the two of them visit the zoo together, Mam tells Victor that they can’t get a photo together because she isn’t allowed to. However, Victor manages to convince the photographer to take a picture of them; he writes, “I decided I could stand my ground too. […] [P]eople 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” (147). Victor uses his personal experiences of discrimination against the system that decided to discriminate in the first place. In representing his rebellion against this system of oppression as a moment of power for Victor, Paperboy takes a firm ethical stance against discrimination and in favor of integration, tolerance, and acceptance.
The Treatment of People With Speech Disorders
Just as Paperboy takes a firm stance in favor of the civil rights movement, it also takes a firm stance against the mistreatment of people with speech disorders. Victor’s speech disorder, a stutter, is shown to negatively impact his daily life and his relationships with others because of the way he is treated. Victor justifies this treatment by saying, “[I]t was bound to be confusing listening to me. But not one time had a grown-up except for Mam and my speech teacher talked to me about my stuttering” (60). Victor has internalized what he believes other people think of him due to his stutter, convincing himself that they are correct for judging him. Because of this, Victor’s first response to other’s judgment and subsequent mistreatment isn’t to become angry or defensive, but rather to understand the reasons why the other person might feel that way. Victor, in this capacity, demonstrates great empathy for others but not as much understanding of himself, which mirrors the fact that others rarely seek to understand him. He reflects, “It’s like I walked into a room with an organ-grinder’s monkey sitting on my head and everyone pretending the monkey wasn’t there” (60). The reference to an organ monkey suggests that others’ treatment of Victor makes him feel like a figure of ridicule. The text hence emphasizes that acknowledging a speech disorder is more humanizing than ignoring it.
By the end of the novel, Victor has demonstrated growth with regard to this, seeming to recognize the flaws in thinking that undergird it. When forced to introduce himself to his seventh-grade class, he says, “My name is Victor Vollmer the Third. I stutter when I talk but I like words anyway. I also like to play baseball” (219)—the gaps between the words represent what it feels like to speak with a stutter. However, unlike at the beginning of Paperboy, Victor does not feel the need to apologize for speaking with a stutter. He has come, through the help of Mam and Mr. Spiro, to accept himself for who he is, which gives him greater self-confidence. By the end of the book, the book’s ethical stance on discrimination is clear: Just as it is patently and obviously unfair to treat Black people differently under the law than white people, it is also wrong to discriminate against people with speech disorders.
Independence in Childhood
Ultimately, Victor’s arc throughout the novel hinges on his increasing and intentional independence. At the beginning, the idea of the paper route scares him. Victor has never had a job before, much less one that would force him to interact with people unfamiliar with his stutter. However, as his relationships with Mr. Spiro and Mrs. Worthington deepen, so too does his sense of independence. The paper route itself represents a prototype of financial independence for young people since it enables Victor and Rat to earn money and learn how to enter the working world.
As the novel continues, Victor demonstrates an increased ability to decide for himself whether to follow a rule. For instance, when Mam first tells him to stay away from Ara T., Victor decides instead to break into Ara T.’s shack to retrieve his stolen knife. Despite the foolishness of doing so, Vawter presents it as a powerful moment since it is still a more independent action than he would have taken a few weeks prior. The novel portrays independence as empowering and an essential element of coming of age.
One area in which Victor demonstrates increasing independence is that of friendship. At the beginning of the book, Victor has one close friend: Rat, a fellow member of the baseball team. By the end of the book, Victor has made many more friends and does not depend so much on Rat to get his social interaction. Early on, Rat leaving for the summer means that Victor’s summer will be mostly empty unless he takes on the paper route, despite the fact that he doesn’t want to. However, by the end of the novel, Victor has realized that he doesn’t need to rely on Rat and lets him go when Rat starts to date a classmate of theirs, demonstrating his increasing independence. The independence enables Victor to grow and learn more about himself from others, reinforcing the novel’s message that independence is synonymous with growing up.
Victor also shows increasing independence from caregivers around him. When Mr. Spiro tells Victor that he’s going to leave for a few months, Victor is upset. However, when Mr. Spiro goes on his vacation at the end of the novel, Victor is no longer upset but is excited for him to return, demonstrating increasing independence from the parental figures in his life. Furthermore, while Mam protects Victor throughout the novel, Victor protects her from Ara T., reinforcing his independence from caregivers.
