Nothing Gold Can Stay Literary Analysis

All good things turn bad. One moment everything seems perfect, but in reality it’s all crashing down. Even the best of things can never stay. Throughout the novel The Outsiders, this grueling reality is showcased. In the story the protagonist is Ponyboy. Ponyboy has always grown up around his brothers and their Greaser friends. While growing up they had always envied the Socs: a group of wealthy high class kids, this progressed to fights among them. One night a meaningless fist fight turned bad when Johnny, Ponyboy's friend, murdered a socs out of selfdefense. This lead to both Johnny and Ponyboy having to run away to stay clear of the police. Throughout the story Ponyboy had to face many challenges in order to survive. In Robert Frost’s poem

The Outsiders is written in novel while “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is written as a poem. By being a novel, The Outsiders can show its theme numerous time throughout the story. For example in the story Ponyboy and his two best friends Dallas and Johnny get injured in a fire after trying to save children. Hinton describes this moment on page 148, it states, “You read about people looking peacefully asleep when they’re dead, but they don’t. Johnny just looked dead. Like a candle with the flame gone” (Hinton, 148). This shows the theme that all good things turn bad. Ponyboy's best friend and only family, because his mom and dad died, got killed. This shows that Johnny the only person that Ponyboy really liked had to die because all good things have to turn bad. Referring back a previous quote in my paper, Hinton also used Ponyboy getting beat up over his possible girlfriend to show the overall theme of the novel. This shows that in The Outsiders the theme is showed in multiple places. Unlike in The Outsiders, Robert Frost showed the overall theme of the poem all at once. To show the theme Frost states, “Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf, So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day Nothing gold can stay” (Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”). This shows that all good things turn bad including the Earth. Even though both The Outsiders and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” share the same theme, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” shows the theme all at once and not several times throughout the