The Outsiders Reflection

Reading The Outsiders for the third time was an interesting experience because I was able to more fully examine and name what I felt while reading the novel. While I certainly had a sense of RECOGNITION when I first read The Outsiders, I was not yet attuned enough to my own emotions to pinpoint all of the feelings Ponyboy and I shared at that time. Now that I have had the complete experience of adolescence and the time to more critically analyze my emotions it is easier for me to recognize my young self in Ponyboy. As Felski notes, “when we recognize something, we literally ‘know it again,’ we make sense of what is unfamiliar by fitting it into our existing scheme, linking it to what we already know [or once knew, but had forgotten].” While I now know many of my peers share the same feelings, likes, and dislikes as me, I was able to perfectly recall when I thought “I was the only person in the world that did” have those feelings and much like Ponyboy, “I loned it” because of this (2).

Hinton was able to bring to words the struggles lower socioeconomic status children face and the way boundaries are constructed between the lower and upper classes. As I read I recognized the difference between greaser and Socs as being similar to the kids who lived in the ghetto versus the kids who lived in the nice neighborhoods in my hometown, even though our own fights were not typically as violent as the ones seen in The Outsiders. The recognition I felt while reading this novel was enhanced by a shooting that occurred in my own community on September 22nd. The shooting took the lives of five people; one of the victims was only sixteen. The shooting happened at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, which is where I spent nearly every weekend when I was thirteen. No motive has been released for the shooting, but some members of the community are speculating that it may have been an act of gang violence, which is something that has plagued my community since I was