Voice in S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders
What makes a book memorable
I realized my reading omission for S.E. Hinton’s debut novel in the most roundabout way. In my class, I was alternating reading The Great Gatsby and poetry. One day, I assigned Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” A student immediately raised her hand and asked if this was the poem in The Outsiders. I confessed I hadn’t read the book.
The shock and surprise on her face. She had encountered an English teacher who had never read The Outsiders. How can that be? After all, it’s so good.
To be fair, I would have read it in junior high, since I spied my older brother bringing a copy home when he was in eighth grade. But then we moved a year later.
I embarked on a quest to understand what it is that makes middle-schoolers love this book so much. I admit, I didn’t see the appeal at first. The story has been done a million times over. Tragic, misunderstood youth. Antics and heroics side by side. The overdone theme of “on the inside, we’re all the same.” A first-person narrator who claims to be the author of the book, as if it were nonfiction.
It’s a tale as old as Romeo and Juliet, except with a friendship between a group of boys replacing star-crossed lovers.
So what makes it a memorable read for the typical middle school student? It took me a bit, but I realized it was the authentic voice. The narrator’s diction and tone sound like a genuine adolescent. On the one hand, it’s no surprise since Hinton drafted the novel while in high school. But on the other hand, it seems like a careful choice, considering that I have read enough teenage writing not to presuppose that a young author means an authentically adolescent voice.
Ponyboy’s diction, or to put it simply, his word choice, makes for a believably youthful narrator. Hinton wastes no time with establishing Ponyboy’s way of talking:
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. I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman–he looks tough and I don’t–but I guess my own looks aren’t so bad. (1)
Hinton drops the reader in media res and draws them in by the simplicity of Ponyboy’s statement. He wants two things. Since Paul Newman’s looks are one thing he can’t do much about, Ponyboy reasons, “I guess my own looks aren’t so bad,” Not only is he sounding like he’s starting a conversation with the reader, but the conversation is genuine teenager-speak: I guess and so bad.1 The other desire, the need for a ride home, propels the action in the next few pages. It leads to the first conflict, a run-in with the Socs, upper-class kids who look down on Greaser kids like Ponyboy. Hinton also uses diction to reveal Greaser-speak to her readers when Ponyboy describes the difference between tough and tuff; the former meaning rough and the latter meaning cool (12). Ponyboy’s diction in this case lets readers in on an insider secret and strengthens their connection with the narrative.
Ponyboy’s diction contributes to his overall conversational tone. Ponyboy writes like he talks. For example, instead of saying his older brother, Soda, always defends him, Ponyboy tells the reader, “Soda always takes up for me” (13). When he meets two upper-class girls at the movies who should be rivals, Ponyboy narrates, “We had picked up two girls, and classy ones at that, Not any greasy broads for us, but real Socs. Soda would flip when I told him” (25). He could have instead narrated, “Soda wouldn’t believe that we met two nice Socs” and gotten the same message across. In both instances, Ponyboy decreases the distance between himself and his audience by drawing them into a colloquial conversation. In addition to Ponyboy’s narration, the dialogue peppered with whattas, outtas, gottas, and wantas helps make the voices of the characters more authentic to real teenagers.
With his conversational tone and simple diction, the reader might think that Ponyboy is just another teenage kid. Yet it’s when Hinton first introduces the theme of the story that the reader realizes Ponyboy’s depth of thought. Cherry, one of the Soc girls he’s met, guesses that he likes to watch sunsets just like she does. Ponyboy reflects on this similarity:
Maybe Cherry stood still and watched the sun set while she was supposed to be taking the garbage out. Stood there and watched and forgot everything else…It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.
While Ponyboy thinks about this similarity in terms of two dissimilar worlds that in the end are one and the same, it becomes clear that Ponyboy and Cherry are kindred spirits despite belonging to different social classes. Ponyboy has already captured the reader with his narrative voice. Now he shows his profound nature through the re-telling of this theme. Ponyboy again waxes philosophical when talking about Robert Frost’s poem, realizing that few people in the world might be so profound as to care about the meaning behind a poem, and whether or not those people are Socs or Greasers doesn’t matter.
In the end, why is voice in a novel so important? Because voice fosters a connection between the author and the audience. It establishes a relationship and mutual trust. A trustworthy voice can make new the theme of “on the inside, we’re all the same.” Voice makes this theme seem more personal and less didactic. It makes a young reader want to keep reading until the end, and then remember, that book was so good.
Maybe you remember reading The Outsiders in your younger years. If you liked it, what was the appeal? Was it voice, or was it something else entirely?
Hinton, S.E. The Outsiders. National Geographic School, 2006.