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Characters, Loyalty, and Violence in Hinton's The Outsiders Essay

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In The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton the author used three main points such as characters, loyalty and violence. The main character of the story, Ponyboy, is fourteen years old. He along with his brothers and his best friend joins a gang on the east side called the greasers, who are poor and wild and also reckless because they have nobody who will take care of them and show them the right way to do things so they have to do everything by themselves (Hinton 24). Ponyboy has two brothers who live together when their parents died (Hinton 13). The oldest brother Darrell gave up college to work on roofs so that he will be able to take care of his brothers Ponyboy and Sodapop. Sodapop works at a gas station so he can also help his brother Darrell …show more content…

Later on Johnny and Ponyboy run into the Socs again in the park all alone by themselves, Ponyboy gets a smart attitude with a character named Bob, after words were exchanged Ponyboy spit in Bob’s face, causing them to start fighting by a water fountain which Ponyboy and Johnny drowned Bob in until he had blacked out underwater (Hinton 51). When the two boys Johnny and Ponyboy comes back to their senses they realize that they have killed Bob when Johnny’s hands are covered in blood with a big switch knife in his hands by the water fountain. The two boys Johnny and Ponyboy are shocked because they have never killed anybody before. They start thinking of ways to get out of it; everybody came asking questions about what happened that night (Hinton 51). The two boys realized that they had to skip town and change their appearance so they ran into Dallas and told him what they have done, they came up with an idea to go to the country where there is an abandoned church that nobody goes to until they can get everything back to normal before they stay in town (Hinton 51). When they made it to the country they change their appearance by cutting their hair short and Ponyboy decides to dye his hair blonde so that nobody would recognize him if they came looking for him.(Hinton

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