Railton Daily Mirror

The Railton Daily Mirror is a local newspaper whose familiar name, The Rear View, turns its role as a chronicler of Railton into a wry pun. In the novel it is both a source of news and an outlet for competing accounts of academic absurdity and public tragedy: William Henry Devereaux, Jr. has written satire for it, and Hank’s Mother contributes to its opinion pages.

Identity and Local Role

The newspaper is also called the Railton Mirror. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. buys a copy at the bookstore across from the student center and scans The Rear View for a follow-up to an earlier report. That report had suggested there was more to William Cherry’s death than first appeared: Cherry had lain down on railroad tracks and been decapitated. The paper’s reporting leaves open the possibility of a fuller explanation, while Devereaux considers that despair may be the simplest account. The search shows the newspaper serving as a record of local events whose implications may remain uncertain.

Satire and the University

The Railton Daily Mirror has published Devereaux’s op-ed satires under the heading The Soul of the University. Writing as Lucky Hank, he offered deadpan accounts of academic lunacy. The series brought complaints from university administrators and colleagues, who accused him of lacking high seriousness, weakening public support for higher education, and biting the hand that fed him. The conflict makes the paper more than a venue: it is where Devereaux’s comic scrutiny of the university becomes public and exposes him to institutional resentment.

After Gracie DuBois wounds Devereaux with the ragged end of her spiral notebook, he privately revises Teddy Barnes’s account of the personnel committee meeting that preceded the injury. Teddy emphasizes Devereaux’s goading of Gracie, while Devereaux thinks the telling misses what it felt like to be him in the room. He considers writing his own version for the Railton Daily Mirror and reviving The Soul of the University, reasoning that the meeting’s absurdity would need no exaggeration. The account remains a contemplated article in this episode, not a reported publication.

Opinion and Local Tragedy

The newspaper’s opinion page also carries a column by Hank’s Mother, who, like her son, contributes frequently. Her column criticizes the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s policy of placing mental patients in facilities previously reserved for senior citizens. As an example, she describes a boy in nearby Bellemonde who, two weeks after leaving the institution responsible for his care, climbed from a tower’s elevator to its roof and leapt. An eighty-year-old resident witnessed his fall onto a car; its horn continued sounding for twenty minutes until rescuers broke into the locked vehicle and disconnected it. The column argues that elderly residents should not have to witness such deaths. Through this account, the newspaper’s local voice joins Devereaux’s satire in making public writing a way to frame painful events, though the column’s subject and tone differ sharply from his comic treatment of university life.