What Is The Outsiders Impact On Society

The Outsiders, an American bestseller from the 1960s, was about the conflict between two rival gangs of teenagers. However, from one of the main characters, Johnny, we could see that he got a deep affection from violence. The violence changed Johnny’s personality, his life and led to the ultimate death of Bob the Soc.
The violence in The Outsiders impacted Johnny because he suffered a lot of violence from his family. A quote in the section where Johnny was introduced to the readers said, “ His father was always beating him up...... I think he hated that worse that getting whipped.”(Hinton PDF chapter 1 page 11) This quote showed that Johnny had a horrible family and his father used to beat him up after getting sober, while his mother, a selfish

From a long quote that was located at the end of chapter 2, “It was almost four months ago......Not over his dead body......”(Hinton PDF 29-31), it showed that four months before the story began, Johnny had been beaten to half-death by four Socs for no reasons, and he never stopped fearing about getting beaten up by the Socs. Although every Greaser had the experience of getting attacked, no one got beaten like that before. From this quote, we could tell that after this event occurred to Johnny, he never felt safe while on the streets, and started to bring a switchblade with him to self defence, even he still was the most law-obeying member of the Greasers.Therefore, the Socs was another reason that Johnny was impacted by the violence in The Outsiders, and caused him to become suspicious and oversensitive, and someone who would use violence to defence

From the quote in chapter four, “The next thing I knew I was lying on the pavement beside the fountain, coughing water and gasping......Where in the world would we get those things?”(Hinton Chapter 5), we could know that as the Socs were drowning Ponyboy, Johnny stabbed Bob and killed him. From this quote, we could know that Johnny used violence to protect his friend and himself. He didn’t really mean to kill Bob, but he couldn’t afford to get beaten up again, and to watch his friend drowned to death right in front of his eyes at the same time, so he chose the only, and the most extreme way out to solve the problem. From his action, we could see that how violence from the others, for example, the Socs, and his family, impacted him. He used to be timid, and calm, but when he was pushed to his limit, he chose to fight back. The result of fighting back was Bob’s death. After this event,Johnny calmed himself down, then, his shy, timid personality kicked in, so he decided not to face the reality, and ran away from the