Literature Analysis

The book that my literature analysis will be based off of is The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. The plot of this story is based around a boy named Ponyboy Curtis and his brothers Darry and sodapop, they were part of a low end group called greasers. During their life time wasn’t easy, and they had a rival group called the Socs, a group of wealthy, privileged boys who would mess with the greasers a lot. The theme of this book is based around the greasers and socs fighting each other. They later learn that the gap between class should not get in the way of how they feel about each other. When reading I don’t recall them taking about being in school. Ponyboy’s daily routine was pretty normal, He would usually get up, eat breakfast and spend time with his gang. There was no meditation or anything like that involved. At a point he wouldn’t even wake up in his home because of how he ran away to an abandoned church with his friend Johnny. Something that helped me understand the book was the slang they used, it was a mix of some gang type stuff and 60s way of speaking, also the way they described the clothes helped too. And you could get a good understanding of where they were based on how the narrator described it. What also helped was the dialogue, and a lot of it had to do with what Ponyboy was thinking.

The thing that drew me to this book was watching a bit of the movie a long time ago, I wanted to read more about what happened because of the nostalgia. I kept reading because every time something new happened and I just wanted to know what was going to happen next. If a story seems really interesting or makes me think more about it then I would want to read more.

An example of direct characterization was Ponyboy, that is pretty obvious, and another was Johnny because of how many times he was mentioned in the story. Examples of indirect characterization was Cherry and Sodapop for the same reason, they weren’t described/talked about as much as other people in the book,their characters were pretty self explained. The protagonist was pretty much static, he really didn’t change much around the story. And he was also round, wouldn’t really confuse or surprise you every now and then. A person in that book that was really well described was Johnny, the way they explained how he lived at home and how his face always looked best up and that he was pretty poor, also that his parents were abusive and would neglect him.