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Examples Of Violence In The Outsiders

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Examples of violence in The Outsiders

Is Violence really the answer to conflicts? For most people, the first instinct is to argue or even starting a fight with someone to overcome conflict and anger. But this isn’t the case for Johnny and Ponyboy in the novel The Outsiders by S.E Hinton. Even Though violence can get rid of anger for a short period of time. Johnny, Darry and Ponyboy’s experiences throughout the novel slowly shows them that violence is not the multitool to solve any type of problem. As a result, changing their personality, the way they walk, talk and act.
An early example is when Johnny and ponyboy who are greasers are in constant conflict with the socs. Multiple examples of how violence would not make the fight any simpler is shown. Take Johnny for an example, on page 4 in the novel, Johnny gets beat up by the socs. He tried to fight back by biting one of them while he was being strangled. “I bit it as hard as I could, one of them said “Shut him up!!”(4). Then they proceeded to beat him even harder. This makes things way more difficult for both sides when one side starts to fight back. The author uses dialogue …show more content…

“Darry wheeled around and slapped me so hard that it knocked me to the door. Suddenly it was deathly quiet. We had all frozen. Nobody in my family had hit me.”(44) This is an excellent example because it shows how shocked Johnny was, at the same time demonstrating that the relationship between them is getting more and more complicated. Even though Darry showed intense violence throughout the incident, deep down, he loves Johnny and all he wanted was for him to come home safely. Which confuses Johnny because it just seems that Darry is hitting him for no reason. In the end, using violence to express something with good intention is not a good solution overall. Even worse, it doesn’t even solve the

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