Juxtaposition In The Outsiders

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Literature written for young adults tends to leave behind the wide-eyed idealism of novels intended for children and depicts a world in which adolescents discover and negotiate their place within various social institutions. The Outsiders, a novel written by S. E. Hinton, continues this major theme of the genre through its depiction of fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis and his attempts to understand his own position as a Greaser in a gang of other youths. The boys all belong to the same general age group, but it is significant that Ponyboy and his friend Johnny are the youngest members of the gang, especially with the way the rest of the gang treats them as their younger brothers. There is a contrast between the attitudes of the older members …show more content…
The juxtaposition of Johnny's and Dally's deaths creates a picturesque image of both the hero and the hoodlum. Johnny dies as a result of an injury he obtained after helping Ponyboy rescue several children from a burning building. They had spent a great deal of time together after the murder of Bob Sheldon, where Johnny killed the Soc with a switchblade after he attempted to drown Ponyboy in a fountain. Despite the fact that Johnny has killed, Ponyboy still seems to invite the reader of his story to understand this as a fairly regular occurrence, though horrible that it had happened to the two of them. The realization that violence is a way of their life falls upon him at this moment. There is a scene early in the novel where Ponyboy turns to Cherry with a broken bottle he intended to use as a weapon still in hand, and hastily assures her that he would never have used it to hurt anyone for real. However, after Johnny's death, Ponyboy once again smashes a bottle and holds it threateningly at a pack of Socs who have approached him with the understanding that he will use it if he has to. In this sense, Johnny's death is symbolic and metaphorical in the sense that is represents that death of the dreamlike childhood state and reveals the imbalance of power for what it truly is. Still, the older members of the gang are unwilling to completely let go of that dream of kindness and innocence. Two-Bit quickly tells Ponyboy not to “get tough” because he's “not like the rest of [them]” and is immediately relieved when Ponyboy picks up the glass so no one would get a flat tire (Hinton
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