Social Class In The Outsiders

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“The Outsiders” is a suspenseful novel that follows a group of lower-class gang members, the Greasers, and their rival, upperclass gang, the Socs. In result of the murder of one of the Socs, the youngest gang members from the Greasers are forced into hiding, and a gang war is set off between the gangs. S.E. Hinton’s, “The Outsiders”, uses characters, setting, and plot to create the theme, social class limits people to accept and see the similarities between one another, in several ways.
Throughout the story, Hinton uses the social class of characters to produce the theme that this social class does not depict our true selves by including statements about the differences in wealth, but continues in the story to show how similar the two groups …show more content…
Throughout the story, the author repeats that the Greasers are poor and the Socs are richer, knowing that depending on where you lived. The story says that the Greasers lived on the “East-side” while the Socs were on the “West-side” and any time that the Socs were talked about, their amount of money was brought up, along with living western/West-side. This shows that there is a correlation between where people lived and how much money they had, defining their social classes. Although these social classes are repeated, the gangs realize near the end of the novel that they are not very different people when they actually converse with one each other. The setting develops the theme because she connects the wealth and where the gangs live, leading up to the two gangs realizing that they are similar people. Since they were so divided from where they lived, they did not talk to each other face-to-face, but they talked about how bad each of the gangs were and they experienced different environments where each of the groups …show more content…
Near the beginning of the movie, a teen from the Socials’ gang and a young teen from the Greasers meet at a movie theater and begin to have conversations. Before having the conversations, Ponyboy Curtis told the girl, Cherry, that only money separated the two gangs, but Ponyboy had a realization after talking with her, “It seemed funny to me that the sunset [Cherry] 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.” This shows that Ponyboy was limited to knowing any similarities between them because he thought he couldn’t talk to her because he was “poorer than the Socs”. Once he started talking, he realized that they “saw the same sunset”, which means that they were not completely different people and they were separated only because of how much money they had.
In S.E. Hinton’s, “The Outsiders”, the characters, setting, and plot are used to establish the overarching theme, social class restrains us from realizing the similarities between
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