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.

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,