The Outsiders | Ponyboy's Coming-Of-Age
In the following essay, the author examines The Outsiders as a coming-of-age novel, focusing on Ponyboy's choices between growing up too soon and never growing up.
David Ansen has called The Outsiders "the prototypical young adult novel." Written when S. E. Hinton was sixteen, it is widely credited with ushering in a new era of "realism" in the writing of young adult novels. Yet Hinton's book also contains haunting lyricism; indeed, the tension between dreamy romanticism and hard-knock realism is part of what the book is about. In the early pages of the novel, Ponyboy Curtis tells us of his two brothers: "Darry's gone through a lot in his twenty years, grown up too fast. Sodapop'll...
[The entire page is 1656 words long]
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