The Outsiders Identity Essay

rue Identity

By: Leighton Bowen

P.4

What is identity? Identity can be how someone dresses, what someone looks like, how someone acts, or even what someone does in their daily life. In the book The Outsiders, each character has their ways to define each other and what they look like. The Outsiders has many different stages where the characters have to go through and deal with different problems and struggles. Each character's identity is made up of how they react to different things like rumbles, deaths, and getting in trouble with the police. The author of the book, The Outsider, S.E Hinton uses similes, allusions, and irony to show how identity helps people understand each other.

The Outsiders uses similes to teach readers that identity helps

Hinton uses similes to show identity, Hinton also uses allusions to show how identity helps people understand each other. Hinton starts to develop the theme of how words and actions can also bring out someone's true identity. Ponyboy states, “I had to read Great Expectations for English, and that kid Pip, he reminded me of us – the way he felt markedly lousy because he wasn’t a gentleman or anything, and the way that girl kept looking down on him” (Hinton 15). At first, this seems like Ponyboy is just saying that Pip reminds him of some of the greasers, but there is much more to it. Ponyboy is just like Pip, they are both orphaned, impoverished, and struggling to understand and figure out what to do in life. When Ponyboy reads about Pip and finds out more about him, he comes to realize that there are other kids out there who might be going through similar things and struggling with the same things in life. Another example of an allusion is, “Stay gold Ponyboy. Stay gold” (Hinton 149). When Johnny is in the hospital, Ponyboy comes to visit him after the rumble. This happens to be right before Johnny dies, and they both knew that it would be the last time they would see each other. Johnny tells Ponyboy this because he does not want Ponyboy to end up like him when he dies young. Johnny wants Ponyboy to live a very long exciting life, but to stay out of trouble and to stop fighting with other classes because that is how he is just going to hurt

Hinton also uses irony to show how identity helps people understand each other. Hinton uses the character's actions to help show what the characters in The Outsiders are like and how they act. Ponyboy says, “He looked like he was having the time of his life” (Hinton 89). This sentence is when the church was burning down and Johnny and Dally had gone in to save the kids. At this moment Ponyboy describes Dally as looking like he was having the time of his life as if saving people was what he was meant for. In the whole book Dally was never the kind of person you would call, “Caring or nourishing,” but when he went into the church it kind of revealed his true self to everyone. When Johnny dies at the hospital after getting bad injuries from the burning church, Ponyboy goes home and puts himself on “House arrest.” He was so sad and so devastated that he could not even get out of bed to clean up his room, so when some of the kids from school came over to check on him they stated, “You couldn't make it to the door through that mess” (Hinton