The Outsiders Close Reading Post
In The Outsiders, there are three different scenes where one of the greasers get jumped by the Socs. The first happens right away in the beginning of the text on page 5. Ponyboy is walking home from the theater when five Socs surround him. One of them asks him “Need a haircut, greaser?” before pulling a knife on him and pinning him down. The major point of this scene is to set up the relationship between the Socs and the greasers, showing us that no one is safe from this fight, even if they’re just walking home, minding their business. I also think there is some use of foreshadowing in this passage, when Ponyboy thinks, “I could smell English Leather shaving lotion and stale tobacco, and I wondered foolish if I would suffocate before they did anything” which is what happens to him at a later scene. Ponyboy manages to scream for the gang and is saved before the Socs could do any real damage beyond a cut and a few hard punches.
The second scene where a greaser gets happens on page 33. The gang find Johnny after he has been jumped by four Socs in a blue Mustang. Johnny, like Ponyboy, wasn’t looking for trouble when the Socs found him, only looking for a football to practice with. One of the Socs wore many rings on his hand and they cut Johnny up really badly. Johnny was nearly beaten to death, threatened, and made to feel so small and afraid that he never walked alone again and began to carry a six-inch switchblade with him at all times. This scene also has major foreshadowing, with Ponyboy telling us exactly what will happen if Johnny ever gets jumped again, “They had scared him that much. He would kill the next person who jumped him. Nobody was ever going to beat him like that again. Not over his dead body…”
The final scene comes on page 54, after Ponyboy gets into a fight with Darry and runs away with Johnny. They decide to walk to the park and back to cool off, when that same blue Mustang pulls up and five Socs come to them. They surround Pony and Johnny, this time reeking of English Leather and whiskey. This is where all of the earlier foreshadow comes to pass. Ponyboy is once again trashed for his hair, this time being told he needs a bath, before the Socs hold his head under water until he nearly suffocates. Johnny does exactly what Ponyboy tells us he would, uses his switchblade to kill Bob, the same Soc who had the rings that had beaten him so badly before.
One of the things that all these scenes have in common is that there is always some mention of the Socs wealth right before they jump the greasers, whether it be their cars or their expensive cologne. This is used to show us that it’s the first thing Ponyboy and they others see about the Socs, the wealth that separates them. Along with Pony nothing their wealth, there is a moment in the first and third scenes where the Socs make sure they remind the greasers that they are less than them, whether it’s pointing out Ponyboy’s greasy hair or flat out calling them white trash. Another thing the scenes have in common is that the Socs only ever attack the greasers when they greatly outnumber them or know they can win. They never make it a fair fight. The main difference of each of these scenes are the escalation of the violence. Even though Johnny’s beating technically happens first, we don’t hear about it until after Pony’s brief run in with the Socs. These individual attacks are used to show that the violence between the two groups is mounting and is likely to explode at any moment. Another difference between the first and second scene from the third is that Ponyboy and Johnny both try harder to scare the Socs off and prove they couldn’t scare them. In the first scene, Pony is so shaken he can’t think of anything to say beyond no when asked if he wants a haircut; but in the third, he fires insults back at the Socs. Even Johnny tries to threaten them to back off, even though he is absolutely terrified. This is supposed to show us that the boys are much fiercest when they are together and want to protect each other more than themselves.
The effect of replaying the Socs wealth right before they do something violent is used to show us both what separates the Socs and the greasers, as well as the similarities between the two even though Ponyboy can’t see them yet. It’s not until later that Pony starts to see that Socs are just people, like they are. The main theme these scenes play on is the violence, and that it’s only making everyone lives worse. Bob loses his life, and Pony and Johnny are forced to go on the run, where Johnny eventually does the same. Hinton is trying to show us right from the beginning that the violence only breeds violence, and that no one was going to safe until the two groups find a way out of the cycle.
I really like the way you take your time through this post. I think it’s more accurate to say this is something of a side by side method because you are comparing and contrasting the different instances of getting jumped. I don’t think you can be following the trail because getting jumped is maybe too large a detail for that. (You could however follow the presence of cologne or bodily scent in the narrative).
I think you have a very good handle on the larger theme of violence and the way Hinton plays up the class difference as both part of and responsible for that violence. My concern here is that your reading might not be as close as it needs to be for a close reading. You mention foreshadowing and you talk about how Hinton introduces violence, which is good, but you don’t stay in the particulars of the text. You jump around a bit and your conclusion is that the message is violence only begets more violence, which 1) I don’t know that you needed to look at all these scenes to suggest (since Ponyboy and Jonny both make that point explicit) and 2) I wonder if at the level of the language and close reading the text isn’t suggesting something more complex and nuanced about what violence is and what it can and can’t do?
When I’m looking at this post, I’m not clear where you might focus for your history paper (due next Tuesday!): I see the cologne, which would be nice and specific. There’s the cars, which might also work. I worry though that you might try to do gang violence or fighting, which is to general. You would need to ground that in a specific historically locatable fight, which might be very hard to do.