Popeye Vitelli

Character Key: 
Display Name: 
Popeye Vitelli
Sort Name: 
Vitelli, Popeye
Race: 
White
Gender: 
Male
Class: 
Lower Class
Rank: 
Minor
Vitality: 
Dead
Occupation: 
Criminal
Cause of Death: 
Executed
Other Texts: 
Biography: 

In this novel the Memphis gangster who commits murders and abducts Temple is appears only in the descriptions of him by Temple herself and Gavin. In Sanctuary, where Popeye first appears, the third-person narrator never gives him a last name, but according to Gavin his "Italian name" is Vitelli (114). Temple refers to him as an "underworld big shot" (112). Gavin's descriptions are more lurid: he calls Popeye "a psychopath . . . a little black thing with an Italian name like a neat and only slightly deformed cockroach: a hybrid, sexually incapable" (110). In connection with Popeye's impotence, Temple says there was no sex "from him" (111), and in this novel's representation of the events described in Sanctuary Popeye's raping her with an inanimate object is not mentioned. After committing the two murders that are referred to in the novel, Popeye is "hanged in Alabama for a murder he did not commit" (114).

Disability: 
impotent
Ethnicity: 
Italian
Individual or Group: 
Individual
Character changes class in this text: 
Date of Death: 
Friday, January 1, 1932 to Saturday, December 31, 1932

digyok:node/character/18992