Summary:
The book is narrated by the Eastside "greaser," Ponyboy. The book begins with him walking out of a movie and introduces the main antagonists, the Westside "socials or socs", when they jump him while walking home. Ponyboy's gang comes to his rescue and we are introduced to his two brothers and the four other members of his group. These boys make up his family, and we witness their triumphs, trials, and losses through Ponyboy. By the end of the book, Ponyboy's losses have changed him, but he has realized the love that he has for his brothers and that he is not defined by the way he has grown up. We learn that he is the one who "authored" the book.
My Evaluation:
There is often a stigma on books that we are required to read in school. Maybe it is because they are required, or maybe we lose faith in our teachers choices after we are forced to read Lord of the Flies. Regardless of why, I have not picked up this book since my brother was required to read it in school. Shame on me. As soon as I picked it up, I could not put it down. Most of my favorite books are ones that you feel like transport you to another place and time, and you feel what the characters feel. The lingo that the "greasers" used was fascinating (tuff, rumble, heater, etc.), and it was mind boggling to learn about this world in the 1960's. A world where fourteen-year- old boys don't think anything of smoking, and most disputes were settled with violence. Beyond the historical significance, I felt that the book had such a strong message that no one should be judged by where they grew up, how much money they have, what they look like, etc. What truly matters is who that person is and who they can be. When I was doing research and found out that The Outsiders has been banned in some schools and libraries. The book doesn't glorify violence and crime, it shows it for the travesty it really is, and how many lives it takes away. It also gives us a glimpse into that kind of mindset, so we can understand why these things happen. I can understand that young children shouldn't read this book, but the book has so much to say - it seems so very wrong to silence it.
Reviews:
Peck, D. (2007, September 23). 'The Outsiders': 40 years later. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/review/Peck-t.html?pagewanted=all
‘The Outsiders’: 40 Years Later
By DALE PECK
Few books come steeped in an aura as rich as S. E. Hinton’s novel “The Outsiders,” which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. At a time when the average young-adult novel was, in Hinton’s characterization, “Mary Jane went to the prom,” “The Outsiders” shocked readers with its frank depictions of adolescents smoking, drinking and “rumbling.” Although other pop culture offerings had dealt with these themes — most notably “Rebel Without a Cause” and “West Side Story” — their intended audience was adult. By contrast, “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. Long credited with changing the way Y.A. fiction is written, Hinton’s novel changed the way teenagers read as well, empowering a generation to demand stories that reflected their realities. In fact, in the novel, the need for a representative literature is a central aspect of 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis’s existential crisis. The book’s famous statement of theme, “Stay gold,” is of course a reference to Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and then there’s the not-quite-believable assertion that the novel was written as a “theme” for Ponyboy’s English class: “Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand then and wouldn’t be so quick to judge.” Despite its obviousness, this device strikes me as crucial to the book, providing a context for the occasionally clunky deus ex machina and foreshadowing, not to mention the sometimes workmanlike prose. To an adolescent, the clunkers probably reinforce the authenticity of the book’s voice, but the framing device establishes that unpolished authenticity as an aesthetic construction.
One suspects, however, that it was accidental here, or unconscious, just as it’s likely that Hinton’s echo of the testimonial frame Salinger used in “The Catcher in the Rye” (“If you really want to hear about it”) wasn’t consciously intended, nor was Hinton’s literalization of Holden’s “If a body catch a body coming through the rye” into the rescue of a group of children from a burning church. In fact, what struck me most as an adult reader (and sometime Y.A. novelist) is the degree to which “The Outsiders” is derivative of the popular literature of its time, sometimes obliquely, as in the Salinger parallels, sometimes more directly. Hinton once said that “the major influence on my writing has been my reading” and names Shirley Jackson as one of her favorite writers. The literal truth of this statement is borne out in these two passages taken from the opening paragraphs of “The Outsiders” and of Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” (1962).
First Jackson: “I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.”
And now Hinton: “I have light-brown, almost-red hair and greenish-gray eyes. I wish they were more gray, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have.”
Although such a strong resemblance between two works would probably be viewed with suspicion in this time of heightened alertness to plagiarism, this and other echoes strike me as crucial to the success of Hinton’s novel. They soften the challenging nature of the book’s subject matter by wrapping it in references, tropes and language familiar to its adolescent readers, even as they alleviate the fears of those readers’ too-earnest parents. Right after the Jackson echo, for example, Ponyboy’s older brother, Sodapop, is characterized as “16-going-on-17.” A quotation from “The Sound of Music” would seem out of place in a novel rife with “blades” and “heaters” and teenage pregnancy, but it’s hard to deny after Ponyboy’s immediate assertion that “nobody in our gang digs movies and books the way I do.”
Indications of Ponyboy’s, and Hinton’s, love continue throughout. Randy Anderson’s “If his old man had just belted him — just once, he might still be alive” sounds a lot like James Dean’s “If he had the guts to knock Mom cold once, then maybe she’d be happy” in “Rebel Without a Cause,” while the scene in which Dallas Winston waves around a gun until the cops shoot him is a cross between the climax of that movie, when Sal Mineo is gunned down for brandishing a weapon that (like Dally’s) is unloaded, and Natalie Wood’s famous “How many bullets?” speech from “West Side Story.”
Going right down the honors English syllabus: Ponyboy and Johnny curl up together for warmth like Ishmael and Queequeg in “Moby-Dick.” Pony’s admonition to himself —“Don’t think” — is as Hemingway “code hero” as it comes. Johnny’s half mechanical, half sublime parsing of Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is reminiscent of Mick Kelly’s response to Beethoven’s Fifth in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” And of course Pony, witness to and chronicler of his friends’ demise, could be the Midwestern cousin Nick Carraway left behind. If there’s a reference to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I can’t find it, save perhaps in the Boo Radleyesque names (although Hinton has said that “Peanuts the Pony” was the first book she ever checked out of the library, so who knows). The text even presupposes judgments about appropriate reading material for a 14-year-old: “I’d read everything in the house about 50 million times,” Ponyboy informs us, “even Darry’s copy of ‘The Carpetbaggers,’ though he’d told me I wasn’t old enough to read it. I thought so too after I finished it.”
The intertextual musings come to a head when Johnny tells Pony that Dallas reminds him of the Southern men in “Gone With the Wind,” which the two boys have been reading to combat boredom while they hide from the police. In Johnny’s view, Dally’s refusal to turn in his friend Two-Bit for vandalism is like the Confederate rebels’ “riding into sure death because they were gallant.” Pony initially rejects this reading, but something about it nags him: “Of all of us, Dally was the one I liked least. He didn’t have Soda’s understanding or dash, or Two-Bit’s humor, or even Darry’s superman qualities. But I realized that these three appealed to me because they were like the heroes in the novels I read. Dally was real. I liked my books and clouds and sunsets. Dally was so real he scared me.”
This is good stuff — great stuff for a teenager. Dally’s “realness” is made apparent by characters in a book; by contrast, the other members of the gang, who’ve limited themselves to playing roles they’ve picked up elsewhere, are suddenly seen as less real, enabling Pony to understand why, at the beginning of the novel, Cherry Valance shyly declared, “I kind of admire him.” What goes unsaid until the end of the story is that Pony, like Dally, needs a book to explain him, but is forced to write it himself.
In his introduction to “Slow Learner,” Thomas Pynchon remarks that the appropriate “attitude toward death” that characterizes serious fiction is usually absent in young-adult literature; but one feels “The Outsiders” would pass Pynchon’s test. Dally is fearless, which Pony recognizes as heroic but also foolish. That Dally’s death scene is a mesh of two of the most enduring moments in American cinema is beside the point. The question is not where the material comes from (“West Side Story” is based on “Romeo and Juliet,” after all, and James Dean’s antihero is a latter-day Bartleby or Raskolnikov) but what the writer does with it. The test comes when Ponyboy sums up the conflict between Socs and Greasers as “too vast a problem to be just a personal thing.” Salinger couldn’t get away with that line, and neither could Pynchon, because their books are too idiosyncratic, too distinct. But Hinton, earnest teenager that she was, wrote to reveal the universality of her Greasers, just as Wright and Ellison did for African-Americans, or Paley and Roth did for Jews.
Each time I came across another borrowing, the success of her strategy was impressed upon me. And at the same time I was reminded of 19-year-old Kaavya Viswanathan, who was flayed last year for borrowing excessively from various sources for her own novel. If some high-minded, plagiarism-wary reader had persuaded S. E. Hinton to remove all references to the books and movies that inspired her, “The Outsiders” probably wouldn’t have slipped past the internal (let alone official) censors that governed ’60s adolescence. Forty years on, we may see the seams of its gilding, but the heart of Hinton’s groundbreaking novel is still, indisputably, gold.
Wyatt, M. Book review: the outsiders. Retrieved from
http://family.go.com/entertainment/article-csm-117702-book-review--the-outsiders-t/?CMP=KNC-YahSSPFamily
Book Review: The Outsiders
Juvenile delinquents are fully and humanely developed here.
By Monica Wyatt
What Parents Should Know
The story and characters grab most teenager's attention. This is far from great literature, but it's highly successful with reluctant readers and with most teenagers.
Common Sense Media Review
Many teens say this is the first book they ever enjoyed reading, even though it's often required. S.E. Hinton wrote it when she was only sixteen years old, and her insight into teen angst may explain why adolescents identify with Ponyboy so strongly.
Readers find plenty of action here and an idyllic view of friendship, a major concern for teens. The dialogue sounds like what we'd expect from 1960s Southwestern teenage delinquents, such as "Shut up talkin' like that" and "Didya catch 'em?" Adults appear in the book only briefly; this is a teenage world, and Ponyboy spends most of his time trying to figure it out.
However, the story doesn't rise much beyond pulp fiction, possibly another reason young readers enjoy it. Hinton gets her characters out of certain murder convictions by suddenly turning them heroes, saving little kids from a convenient fire. Johnny sacrifices himself to atone for his sin. Ponyboy broods about everything, emerging ready for life. But don't dismiss this book because of its lack of literary pretensions. In the battle to get teenagers to read, it's a nuclear missile. Teenagers love this book; it teaches them that they can enjoy reading, as Ponyboy already knows. S.E. Hinton also wrote That Was Then, This Is Now, Tex, and Rumblefish. A superior treatment of real street kids is Ineke Holtwijk's Asphalt Angels.
My Suggestions for Use in a Library Setting:
Books such as The Outsiders can be wonderful teaching tools for children for things outside of the library. I believe this book could be used as a catalyst to have a number of speakers come to the library to talk to students about bullying, hazing, and violence. If the library coordinated it with schools in the area, it could be a field trip to the library for the kids and a learning experience. Bullying, hazing, and violence are all very controversial issues in schools now, and I feel that the school administration would appreciate this opportunity to instill in the children the harm of these activities.
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