Johnny's Death In The Outsiders

Most people in the world are misunderstood at some point in their life. However, if other people’s perceptions of a person create a reputation, it can camouflage their real traits. Dallas (Dally) Winston is a victim of this. A character in the book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Dally is commonly known for being a tough ruthless guy who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. He’s a great fighter and is very confident, but because of his past, it seems his real qualities have been masked. Even though Dallas Winston’s friends misunderstood him to be a cold-hearted and tough person, his experiences and how he treats his friends reveals his loving, self-reliant, and dependable nature.

The novel would be very different if Dally didn’t die. First off, Pony could have told Dally all of the things that Johnny wanted to tell him. Second off, the novel would have a better, happier, ending. Third off, Dally would act very different with Johnny gone. Finally, the gang wouldn’t be torn apart and it wouldn’t cause stress on the rest of the gang.

But once he sees Johnny it gives him something to love and care about. He made sure that Johnny didn’t become violent. He says in the book multiple times he cares about Johnny he said “Johnny…I just don’t want you to get hurt.” A quote also says that “Johnny was the only thing that Dally loved. And now Johnny was gone.” Later in the book Johnny dies and it is too much for Dally and he gets himself killed. Dally was so distraught, he wanted to be dead.

A very important comparison Dally and Johnny have is their parents. Johnny’s parents do not care about him. They either beat him or ignore him completely. “His father was always beating him up, and his mother ignored him” (12). His parents are alcoholics and do not care if he comes home or not. Likewise, Dally parents also do not care about him. If he was put in jail by age ten, then his parents clearly do not care enough to discipline him. He rarely talks about his parents, but when he does, he has nothing nice to say. “‘Shoot, my old man don’t give a hang whether I’m dead in jail or dead in a car wreck or drunk in the gutter’” (88). Dally talks about his father with disgust, like he never did anything for him, which may be true. The way Dally’s parents and Johnny’s parents both do not care about them makes these two characters very similar.

This causes Dally to become reckless and finally ending in him being killed by the police, Ponyboy tells the reader “Dally Winston wanted to be dead and he always got what he wanted.” (p.187). From this the reader can gather how the events had modified Dally, creating a more emotional and caring character, weakening his value for himself and in return, strengthening his value for others.

Dally lived a hard life from the get go, he was from the "Rough side of New York." Dallas' life required great amounts of energy to sustain because there was no tranquility of his emotions at anytime other than when he slept. Constantly the reader and Ponyboy found Dally in an aggregated mood of on fire with anger. With the passing of Johnny the only thing of a normality in Dally's rocked and shaken world Dallas had lost his footing no longer on the ground, nothing steady to hang onto his world spun further down into complete turmoil and despair with every fleeting second. Dally saw only one way out, a permanent solution for a temporary problem, so Dally pulled the unloaded pistol out on the cops and fatally shot numerous times to the chest. "When I saw his face on his motionless body before it hit the ground I saw a face of grim victory." But Johnny's death affected everyone to some extent; Ponyboy, his closest friend suffered a severe mental breakdown and as for the rest like Soda it really got them thinking too. Johnny died young and he had seen it all, all the wrong things. It could have been any one of them but it was innocent Johnny a Greaser, who defied the stereotypes and died for a noble cause.

Dally is a very important character in the novel, The Outsiders. Dally helps Ponyboy and Johnny after Johnny kills a soc. He hands them money, a gun, and a map. He also gives them advice on where to hide out. Dally is a character who always seems to be doing the wrong thing. He has been to jail numerous times for many different reasons. After Johnny dies, Dally decides to rob a store and pulls a gun so that the police will shoot him. The police shoot him down and Dally died before he even hit the ground. If Dally hadn’t died, some parts of the story could have changed, and some aspects of the story could have stayed the same.

Dally and Johnny may be very different, but they have extremely important similarities. For example, both of these characters place very little value on their lives. Dally is first arrested at the age of ten and he loves to break

Johnny and Dally are basically polar opposites with respect to their personalities. At the beginning of the story, Johnny’s personality is described. The author writes, “Johnny couldn’t say “boo” to a goose… I had never heard Johnny talk back to anyone” (35). It is shown that Johnny is a very shy and sensitive boy. Since Johnny

Johnny is scared of his own shadow and Dally does not fear anything. His own gang thinks that Johnny is the gang’s pet and dally is mean. Johnny has never left the greaser neighborhood, when Dally spent three years on the wild side in New York and gets tougher and harder there.

Firstly, Dally had a breaking point. Dally’s breaking point was losing Johnny. This showed that he cared about what was happening to Johnny. The group of greasers talked while Johnny had passed away and got a call from Dally, they didn’t think that Johnny had a breaking point. It means that he cared too much about Johnny. You don’t reach something like a breaking point over nothing, it is usually about something you intensely care about or is important to you. Dally was uncaring about most things. In the book, the greasers had said that Dally hadn’t cared about many things, but he deeply cared about Johnny. He is mostly portrayed as unfeeling, but this was proof that he wasn’t always like that. He thought that death was easier than dealing with the pain of his loss. Pain is the key word in that sentence, he had felt pain. He

Dally’s death was a key event in The Outsiders. He is the literal embodiment of the Nothing Gold Can Stay poem. When he was born, he didn’t know pain and instead was ‘gold’. As he grew up, he had to survive by himself, due to his father not giving ‘a hang whether [he is] in jail or drunk in the gutter’ (page 107). He was arrested at the age of ten and was ‘hardened in jail’ (page 110). His survival came at the cost of his ‘gold’. Consequently, this dangerous life led to his ‘violent and young’ (page 187) death. Dally personifies the poem, being the ‘nature’ in the poem. ‘Nature’s first green is gold’ shows

If Johnny had not killed Bob in the lot they might have died and the story wouldn't have progressed to the point itś at now. If Dally hadn't given them advice they would probably be in jail and the story wouldn't have progressed to the point it's at now. If it was Pony all alone in the story then he wouldn't have gotten into trouble like that in the first place. Dally and Johnny place a vital role in progressing the story quickly yet keeping thing interesting. The Outsiders is a book of conflict- between characters, social classes, between economic classes but no matter what Pony, Dally, and Johnny stick

The Outsiders is a novel written by a then 15 year-old by the name of S.E. Hinton. The tale of social divides revolves around a group of six teenage “greasers”. One of these greasers is Dallas “Dally” Winston. The greasers are the poor and underprivileged in society. The greasers as a group are in a constant struggle against the socialites, the high point of society, who are referred to as “socs”. Dally Winston is among the worst of them in terms of respect for the law. “He had quite a reputation. They have a file on him down at the police station. He had been arrested, he got drunk, he rode in rodeos, lied, cheated, stole, rolled drunks, jumped small kids--he did everything.”(11). Dally is said to have lived in New York for three years and had been arrested at the young age of 10. His behavior seems wild and unexplainable, but it can be deciphered through the means of Erikson’s theory on the stages of development, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.

Johnny and Dally have similarities but they also have differences as Johnny dies a hero Dally dies a hoodlum. Johnny goes into the burning church to save those kids and that is heroic. Johnny also died because he saved those kids and put their lives in front of his. Johnny is a greaser and things don't go his way but he has it in him to save the kids which is a heroic act. Dally says “‘ They’re still writing editorials about you in the