Patty Keene Character Analysis

A white waitress in one of Dwayne Hoover’s Burger Chef franchises. Patty is a seventeen-year-old “brand-new adult,” and she is working as a waitress to pay her dying father’s hospital bills. She has already failed out of high school, but Patty is “stupid on purpose.” She has programmed herself, “in the interest of survival,” to be “an agreeing machine instead of a thinking machine.” Patty does not have any original thoughts of her own and instead just thinks what others think. She is raped by Don Breedlove behind the George Hickman Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse after a basketball game, but she never reports it because with her father “dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of the everything,” there is “enough trouble already.” Patty is an obvious example of violence against women in American society, but she also personifies the common stereotype that women, especially beautiful women, must also be stupid.