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Vince VawterA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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.