“The Fox” Character Analysis

The Fox emerges from The Bad Character’s Chevy after the narrator has knocked The Bad Character unconscious with a tire iron. She is in “panties and a man’s shirt,” and wears a silver anklet. Her painted toenails signal to the narrator, Digby, and Jeff, in their intoxicated, frightened state, that she is “already tainted,” and they attack her, “tearing at her clothes, grabbing for flesh.” When a Trans-Am pulls into the lot, the boys abandon her, and she cries to the two blond men driving the approaching car that the three boys tried to rape her. The Fox brings out the boys’ true badness and represents their descent into actual danger and violence—when they attack her, they are no longer playacting at being a cool kind of bad, but instead they have descended into true moral decay.