Victor's Mother's Grasp of Language
Victor has a wide vocabulary and a love of words, and is in fact a gifted writer. He has an enormous problem getting these words out and has a very obvious stutter. The irony here is that his mother is perfectly capable of getting words out, and expressing herself in an understandable way, but she has no grasp of correct vocabulary at all and generally gets the words all wrong. Victor knows the right words but can't verbalize them, whereas his mother verbalizes the wrong words or the wrong meaning.
Victor's Love Of Words
Because he is unable to get his words out without tremendous effort, and is often unintelligible when he does, you would imagine that Victor would be rather resentful of words. Ironically, he loves words, and loves to learn new ones, even giving this as the little known fact about him to his new class at the start of the school year.
Victor's Gift As A Poet
When a person has a stutter, or stammer, they can easily view words and language as their enemy. However, ironically Victor thinks of words as his friends, collecting new words and writing poetry that blends words together in a way that makes it seem as though he is especially gifted with them. Despite the definite lack of poetry in the way that he speaks, Victor has poetry in his heart that he can bring out through writing.
Mrs Worthington's Beauty and Sadness
Mrs Worthington is the most beautiful woman that Victor has ever seen and he observes that usually pretty people are very happy, but ironically Faye Worthington is also the saddest person he has ever seen as well as being the prettiest, seemingly miserable with her life, her husband and her situation.
TV Boy
When he first starts the route, Victor is rather scathing of the child he calls "TV Boy" whom he always sees through the living room window staring transfixed at the television screen and watching shows all day rather than playing outside, making friends or enjoying whatever is going on in the outside world. This is ironic, because as much as he dislikes being judged by others on his inability to express himself without stuttering, Victor is making the same mistake and judging the boy as lazy and addicted to television without getting to know him or his story first. It turns out that the boy, whose name is Paul, is deaf, and is learning to lip read by watching the television; not only this but Victor and Paul become close friends after he finds out more about him.
