A quick survey of the interior—the dirty shades, the rickety chairs, the threadbare rugs—revealed a sorry truth about Marc’s rise in the big city, a truth that he had too long concealed from the folks back home: “living the life,” at his salary, meant dinner out once a week, not much more

The answer is: unexpected.

A stereotype is a figure that is unchanging, oversimplified and commonly accepted to represent a person, thing or event.

In literature, a character that is a stereotype may be employed in order to explore its characteristics and denounce them as false or inaccurate, or, for various motivations, hold them to be accurate (usually one would find this in text of a propagandistic nature). However, the use of stereotypical characters is usually a poor choice to work on a character since the traits of a stereotype are typical, unoriginal, and oversimplified, which goes to the detriment of the author´s capacities as a writer.