The Outsiders

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The Outsiders ‘The Outsiders’ is written by S.E. Hinton. It is set in the 1960s in a town in the USA. It is about the conflict of the two main teenager gangs called the Socs (short for Socials) and the Greasers. The Socs live on the West side where they live a supposedly better life with everything that they want and the Greasers live on the East side with nothing much but anger and jealousy about the Socs who always seem to be privileged in every way. The conflict (a state of disharmony between incompatible or antithetical persons, ideas, or interests; a clash.) remains strong because of the dissatisfaction of the opposing gangs with their lives. Socs and Greasers are separated into two different groups mainly because of the economic differences of their families. Socs can go on skiing holidays while the Greasers hang around at home and the cinema. Other than economically, they also think differently and have different values. “You’re more emotional, we are sophisticated - cool to the point of not feeling anything…” (Cherry Valance, Ch.3, page 44) Socs get high education, they can go to college and make the track team, while the Greasers drop out of school and work or hang around the streets. The conflicts between the Greasers and the Socs are both violent and non violent. The violent conflicts in this book are the gang fights. Both gangs call a massive gang fight a ‘rumble’. It is where both gangs fight each other face to face when something ‘big’ happens and needs to be solved. The two main gangs (Greasers and the Socs) usually choose skin fights over weapon fights. The main fight between Bob, Pony, Randy and Johnny is the scene where Johnny kills Bob because Bob wanted to drown Pony and beat Jo... ... middle of paper ... ... the characters in this book are social conflicts, inter-group conflicts and personal conflicts. The forms of conflict can be resolved after sorting out the misunderstandings between each other. Even though the groups are separated by their financial circumstances and by their physical location on opposite sides of the town, the difference does not necessarily make natural enemies of the two gangs. Members of both groups inevitably experience fear, love, sorrow, sometimes also misunderstandings and discrimination, regardless of whether they live on the East-side or the West-side. Ponyboy writes his theme about the deaths of three boys that he knew as an attempt to tell other boys “living on the wrong sides of cities” that there was still “good in the world” (Page 189). This is his tribute to the power of tolerance over the destructive effects of violence.

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