Lipsyte's writing style enhances the substance of his story in The Contender. He reveals Alfred's life primarily through his own eyes. Lipsyte's occasional similes and metaphors are particularly apt; his dialogue and imagery are powerfully effective.
For the most part, Lipsyte uses a third-person narrative, limited to insight into Alfred's mind. We see the story through Alfred's eyes. The narrative is linear, which means that it proceeds within a certain timeframe from beginning to middle to end. We usually know what month it is and often which day of the week. The setting or context is New York City, usually Harlem, from June to December of a year in the mid-1960s. Although Lipsyte presents no actual flashbacks, Alfred often recalls events from the past in such detail that the reader might feel that he has witnessed them. An example of the power of this kind of memory is the discovery of the cave with James, which took place ten years before the action of the novel.
The author makes selective use of similes, comparisons using the words "like" or "as." When Aunt Pearl takes her little girls to church on Sunday at the beginning of Chapter 4, they sail past the rough-talking nationalist speakers "like starched white tugboats escorting a blue cotton ocean liner." We get a sense of the size of Aunt Pearl, compared to the size of the girls, as well as a sense of Aunt Pearl's devotion to direction. She is not the least distracted from her Sunday morning voyage. Although that simile is as wholesome as Aunt Pearl, many of Lipsyte's similes are as rough as the boxing ring. When Alfred awakes on the day of his first match, he notices that the plaster over the kitchen sink has broken loose, leaving "a powdery-white hole as big as a fist." This simile helps to set the scene for Alfred's day, in which this child of poverty will try to break through to a better life, using his own fists. One of the most effective of Lipsyte's similes describes Hubbard's second knockdown of Alfred in the final fight. Alfred hears a "thud against his ear and then the distant plop, like a stone splashing into the pool at the bottom of a sewer." The simile echoes the violence of the ring as well as the harsh reality of the mean streets that Alfred knows so well.
