The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton is a classic that teens enjoy year after year. Teens are able to relate to the struggle between groups of teens who are all just trying to find their place.
Ponyboy is a greaser, known for their long greasy hair, who is being raised by his two brothers Sodapop and Darry. They are known for being a rough and tumble group who fight a lot to prove they are better than everyone else. They have a grudge against the Socs, short for Socials, who they feel have all the best things money can buy and no problems at all. Ponyboy writes “And you can't win against them no matter how hard you try, because they've got all the breaks and even whipping them isn't going to change that fact" (page 11). Each group of boys has a very strong sense of family. They look out for each other and definitely back each other up in a fight after fight.
Ponyboy’s oldest brother, Darry, is hard on him because he wants him to succeed and graduate from school. After getting into a fight with his brother and running away, Ponyboy and Johnny get jumped by a group of Socs and Johnny ends up killing one of them to protect Ponyboy. Afraid of the consequences, they decide to run away. After a week they decide they can't run from the consequences forever and decide to return home. Before they return home they save some children from a burning building and become heroes. When they return home Ponyboy realizes that things are never going to change for him if he doesn't do something to change his circumstances.
Throughout the book Ponyboy begins to recognize that the Greasers and the Socials are not that different after all. Although they have different situations in which they live but they have common experiences. “It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset" (page 41).
"The Outsiders was a story for teenagers, about teenagers, written by a teenager. Hinton's candid, canny appraisal of the conflict between Socs, or Socials, and Greasers (for which one might substitute Jets and Sharks), published when she was 17, was an immediate hit and remains the best-selling young-adult novel of all time" (Peck 2007).
Reference List:
Peck, Dale. "'The Outsiders': 40 Years Later." New York Times Book Review (2007): 31. http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost. com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=lih
(accessed September 17, 2011).
No comments:
Post a Comment