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The Outsiders Character Analysis

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The Outsiders Essay

“Oh no!” My hand flew to my hair. “No, Johnny, not my hair!” Pony says. He didn't want to trim his long, greasy, slick-back hair, which made him look like a greaser. Pony cares for his friends and family including his hair as an aspect of who he was. Ponyboy Curtis, the 14-year-old member of the gang who is known as handsome and innocent, is the youngest. He discovers a strong power within himself later on in the book, the Outsiders by S.E Hinton. The Greasers, who live on the east side of the city, and the Socs, who remain on the West, are the main social class that the characters in the book belong to. The Greasers are constantly neglected by their own parents and cut off from the rest of society, the Socials are a …show more content…

He is a really sensitive young person, in fact. Given that his parents are dead, his family is rather unusual. He values his brothers as a result. The Greasers, Ponyboy's friends and group, are equally significant to him. The Greasers are mostly a social …show more content…

He enjoys daydreaming about different lives. Although he does not place a high concern on belonging to a group, both identity and survival are important. But it is a factor of who he is. He starts to question the class division after meeting Cherry. Pony is conscious of the injustice of the split between the Socs and the Greasers, which is determined by economically constructed neighborhood lines. Ponyboy, at the start of the rumble when Darry squares off against his former football teammate who is a Soc and currently enrolled in college. Ponyboy thinks, “they used to be friends, and now they hate each other because one has to work for a living and the other comes from the West Side. They shouldn't hate each other . . . I don't hate the Socs anymore”. He learns to understand that socs, like greasers, are human as he begins to value the socs more. and that they project an ideal of perfection on themselves that is untrue, unlike how perfect they appear to others.

As for the last point that shows Pony's ongoing character development is the fact that he is making an effort to apply the belief that these roles and class differences are surface-level in his personal life. Being a greaser, in his opinion, is unreasonable because so many people are disrespectful to him and him as a person. He later discovers there is way more to life than his own viewpoint. Ponyboy matures from thinking his brother Darry hates him to

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