Bokrecension: The Outsiders av S. E. Hinton

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The story is taking place in the 60’s in a city in Oklahoma. This book is based on a true story about a big rivalry betweens two gangs named Socs and Greasers. Socs are the rich gang from the west side, and Greasers are from the east side and live a more poor life then the Socs does. The city is quite big and has at least one park, which I think describes quite beautiful with a fountain, playground and so on.

The Socs and Greasers clothing and interests are really different from each other. Socs is, like I’ve already mention, the rich gang. They play football, drinks a lot, have chicks around, they drive a nice mustang and so on. Greasers, on the other hand, steal things, drive old cars which they have souped-up, wear blue jeans and leatherjackets. They did never speak to each other; the only time they meet is when they fight.

Ponyboy, who is the central figure, is fourteen years old, has quite long brown-red hair, green-gray eyes and lives that kind of poor life in the east side of the city with his brothers, Soda and Darry. He goes in school and is actually one of the smartest in his class.
Soda is sixteen going on seventeen years old and works at a gas station. He has brown quite short hair, a beautiful smile which makes the girls melt, shortly said – he is the handsome one. Soda understands almost everything and he cares about everyone in his gang and family.
Darry is the oldest one; he is the one who takes care of the family, he works a lot and is not interested of reading or drawing. He has dark-brown hair, is quite tall and muscular and his eyes are ice-blue with a bit of green in it. Darry is overprotecting and handle Ponyboy like a six year old and doesn’t always realize that he maybe is too hard.
And at least; Johnny, he is really close to Ponyboy, Soda and Darry. He doesn’t like his parents so much, especially not his dad, because he beats him up quite often and his mother does never care. Johnny is kind of a paragon for Ponyboy, but personally I don’t think that he is the right person to be named a paragon.

Every figure has it owns character. In my opinion Johnny is kind of a hero, because he saved Ponyboy from get to be drowned in the fountain by the Socs, but I think he also is a victim because he had to kill the guy who was trying to kill Ponyboy. Many should maybe think that my thinking is a bit crazy when I say so, but I can just think about how I should react if it was my friend who was trying to be killed. In “the end” of the book Johnny and Ponyboy also save many kids from getting locked in into a burning church, and there of I think they both could represent the title heroes. There are many things in the book that I could write about to name out which person that fits with which character, but shortly I can say that everybody is in one way or another both heroes, victim, villain and friends.

When I read about Ponyboy and his thoughts around fights, I actually get surprised over how a fourteen year old boy, who live in those neighborhoods, can be so smart and think so clear, because he is not one of them who wants to get involved to the fights and all that. He can actually see that there is no big difference between the Socs and the Greasers, everybody has their own problems and most of the others take out their anger on each other, which Ponyboy think is wrong. Of course will he be there to back up his friends if they gets in trouble or something, but as much as I understand – he want to stay out of the fights as much as possible. My guess on the question “why does he think like that?” should probably be that he knows how much people can hurt each other, which is really unnecessary.
Ponyboy and Darry is much like other brothers and sisters; fights (by words), call each other mean things, pull each other down a bit and so on. But every since Johnny killed that guy from the Socs gang, Johnny and Ponyboy had to ran away, and they didn’t tell Darry, which lead to that Darry soon get worried and he realized what he had done to his little brother. After that he told Ponyboy that he would try to be better to him. This means that they got closer to each other because Darry got time to think for real while Ponyboy were gone.

In the quite beginning of the story Ponyboy, Johnny and a guy called Dally went to a movie, and there they met a girl called Cherry and her friend. Of course Dally couldn’t leave the girls alone, and he was drunk too, so the girl found it really uncomfortable with him around. Johnny and Ponyboy at least told Dally to stop and from that moment Cherry found Ponyboy a bit interesting, but there was a problem – Cherry was one of the Socs girlfriend. Ponyboy was a bit scared first, but Cherry told him to calm down because she wouldn’t let any of the Socs hurt him. They seemed to like each other, but of course, Cherry couldn’t talk to him at school because he was a greaser.

In the end of the book Johnny dies from the wounds from the fire accident after the saving of the kids in the church, but before he died he wrote a letter to Ponyboy. In the letter he wrote that none of the guys should be sad when he was gone, because it is worth to die for a child because he find their life more worth then his own, he also told Ponyboy that he was a great guy and friend.

The book ends with the same lines as it begun with; “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home…” This did actually confuse me a lot at first, but then I realized that it has to be a composition in school from the beginning. In that case, it obviously was a really good one if we look at the fact that it turned in to a book and later it has been produced as a movie too. So shortly said; the book ended with a beginning of a composition, which later turned out to be the whole book itself.

How a seventeen year old girl could write this fascinating book really surprises me. Where did her inspiration come from? Okay, it’s a true story so in the end it maybe isn’t that hard, but still, how many teenagers can handle to write a book like this one? I don’t think that number is so high actually.

I think there is a big, quite clear message in this book, if I should conclude the message, write it down and read it, should I say; “What this author is trying to tell her readers is that it doesn’t matter on which side in a city, in which city and not even which country we live in, because in every country you can always find people which are different from each other in one or another way. It can be all from clothing, housing and money even until personality, character and appearance, it doesn’t matter, because we are all human beings and deserves a chance to live a good life, even if we’re poor.”
We can just look at the example with Ponyboy and Cherry, when Ponyboy is a poor greaser and Cherry a rich Socs, but they realize that it doesn’t matter if we are rich or poor; our money is not our personality.

In the beginning I found The Outsiders kind of boring actually, but as deeper as I came, the more interesting I found the book. Sometimes it was kind of hard to stop reading, but sometimes I found it so boring that I thought of stop reading, but in the end I give The Outsi...