Stereotypes In Dexter's Story

There’s a well-known assumption that authors are an aloof and twisted bunch. Well, Pete Dexter fits this stereotype perfectly. Dexter lived in several places as a child including Illinois, Georgia, and South Dakota (Bodine 1). He experimented with many different careers before becoming a reporter. Dexter suffered brain damage during an incident where he was beaten severely by a drug gang he reported on. He lost his sense of taste, and with that, his love for alcohol. “All of a sudden, I had an extra 50 or 60 hours a week with nothing to do. So I started writing more stuff,” Dexter stated (Bodine 1). Dexter incorporates this beating into his story. His dark personality and thoughts certainly show through into his stories. Particularly in The …show more content…
He uses imagery and descriptions to bring out how miserable life in the swamps can be. Ward and Jack venture out into the glades to find Hillary’s uncle and Dexter’s describes the dilapidated property with specifics. “Beyond the shingles, a nylon line had been rigged, leading from the corner of the main house to the single tree still standing in the front yard. Half a dozen alligator skins hung from the line, none of them more than four or five feet long,” (Dexter 119). Dexter makes it easy to picture a run-down, unkept house. The people he places in the snake ridden Florida woods also shed light on the parts of America that should remain hidden. He wants his readers to realize that there are real people like Hillary Van Wetter. Hillary is “a north Florida swamp rat with a well-earned reputation for ferocity who is convicted of murdering the town sheriff,” (Hower 1) and represents the lawless, dirty outskirts of civilization. Dexter uses the Van Wetter family to snapshot of the worst kind of American citizens, and to make his readers …show more content…
The ill-fitting nature of the interactions contribute to the overwhelming dark theme seen throughout the novel. The most notable struggling relationship is between W.W. James, the father, and his boys, Jack and Ward. The family, father-son bond should be natural, but Dexter twists it to make the story more complex. Dexter creates the characters through the dialogue exchanged (Hower 3). Conversations between W.W. and Jack are always brief, but are packed with tension. “‘Working into the night,’ he said, ‘that’s when you wear out, start to make mistakes.’ It seemed to me that he wanted to know how my brother was doing. ‘Ward doesn’t get worn out the way other people do,’” (Dexter 108). The brief exchanges of conversation between Ward and Jack demonstrate how Dexter creates his characters’ distressed relationships. Nick Kimberly describes Dexter’s unique way of creating tension through characters perfectly by stating, “It leaves the reader distinctly edgy, fumbling for a hand-hold on a surface that offers none. The flat monotone of Dexter’s prose, shorn of imaginative excess, only adds to the queasiness,” (Kimberly 2). Dexter purposely manufactures these stiff relationships. He channels his antisocial side into The Paperboy well, and creates sophisticated, awkward