The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton Review

I read The Outsiders for my Young Adult Literature class, and was excited to find out my current impressions, because I last read it in middle school, like many of us. I was surprised by how much and how little I remembered. The feeling of the world and descriptions of the boys were familiar, and the general time and setting was captured very clearly through the writing, prose, and vernacular. Hinton discusses the boys' appearances right away, and it lent a very vivid image of the characters immediately and I had no trouble imagining what they looked like. However, I was surprised by how little I realized during my first reading, the sheer tragedy and helplessness of the entire story. All I remembered from my reading as a younger teen was that the boys had funny names and that someone died. But the way Ponyboy describes the helplessness of the “Greasers” who he loves like family but must watch them face their “fate” of dying young and desperate cut me deep, maybe because I am older and can understand and sympathize with how “things are rough all over.” Sodapop loses Sandy. Darry has to give up his dreams of going to college and lets out steam by fighting. Johnny has to face his loveless home and trauma. The boys lose loved ones to the harsh world all around them. the most heartbreaking part of it all for me was how little these huge impacts on the boys mattered to the rest of the world and Socs, the beatings they gave out were no more than some fun and rebellion to them, the story of the murder just another news headline. Johnny wants nothing more but for Ponyboy to "stay gold," to not allow the world to harden and tarnish his kindness and sensitivity. Nothing much changes for them by the end, but there is hope in the precocious narrator, who hates violence and wants more than what the world has dealt for him and his friends.