My Journal Reflection on The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton for Young Adult Lit.

The Outsiders is a powerful tale of friendship, rivalry, and the duality at the root of human nature. Those who have read it all know the story on the surface, the chain of events from Ponyboy being threatened by the Socs while on his way home, to the fire in the church, followed by Johnny’s death, then Dally’s, and everything that led up to Ponyboy Curtis working on a theme for his English teacher, Mr. Syme, that began with the words “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home….” This book is a world of its own, though it is set somewhere in the American Southwest during the 1960s. The story oozes with a life of tumult in a time when big changes were taking place in the world.

It is hard to believe that a book with such a specific context could be as timeless as Hinton’s masterpiece is in The Outsiders. I believe that it is so timeless because of the story that runs beneath the surface of the plot. The characters’ absolute humanity makes this book universal in nature. Our world still has class struggles, gang violence, and we live in a world of rattling changes hurtling toward mankind at breakneck speed. More importantly, we’re still human. The true, ongoing battle that connects us all with these characters is the battle we fight with the duality of our human nature. No human being can really exist as a two-dimensional character. We are all real, three-dimensional characters with varying degrees of internal and external conflict in our stories. Our lives are our stories, and we are naturally multifaceted creatures. Battles are constantly fought between the ego, super ego, and the id, to put it in psychological terms.

I don’t know of a person who willingly, openly shows all sides of their personality to the world. Everybody has filters, secrets, and everybody lies. I don’t mean for this to sound dark and condemning. I’m just saying that we all have veneers that are presented to the world, as opposed to the complete Gordian Knots of thought and emotion that we can only truly see for ourselves. Hinton did an excellent job of portraying this universal truth with the sympathetic characters she created. I believe that this work is timeless because it paints a faithful portrait not only of Southwestern America in the 1960s, but also of universal human emotion.