Black Boy Literary Analysis

Words: 1523
Pages: 7

The innocence of a kid is something to cherish for as long as you can. It should be protected so that kids don’t see the harsh realities of the world so soon, but it’s different for each person. In the fiction book, The Outsiders, by S.E Hinton, and the autobiography Black Boy, by Richard Wright, they are deep and grappling books with a common theme that life events cause a person to lose their innocence. Each book shows the reader the harsh realities of life and how two kids, Ponyboy from The Outsiders and Richard from Black Boy, lose their childlike innocence at a young age due to the life experiences they endured. Pony loses his parents, witnesses a murder, and loses two of his friends while Richard goes hungry, loses his dad, and has to …show more content…
Ponyboy lost his parents, witnessed a murder, and lost his 2 best friends and Richard went hungry, lost his father, and almost kill a gang that was mugging him. The authors develop the theme in a certain way and both Wright and Hinton used similar and different ways to show it. In The Outsiders, Hinton makes Pony go through horrible events to change his innocence, just like Richard did, but they are different because Pony’s experiences revolve around death, (his parents, Bob the Soc, Johnny, and Dally) and that causes him to toughen up in order to keep him alive. But Richard went through different hardships, like not eating, his father leaving, and fighting, which isn’t as bad as what Pony went through. Overall, both of the main characters go through a lot of hardships which change their personalities and innocence which is the themes overall for both texts, but the events themselves are different. In life, we go through hard times and eventually we all have to give up our innocence, but the question is, when will you be ready to give up your innocence because the world is a scary place and we all will have to face it