Reflective Essay On The Outsiders

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are”- Mason Cooley. Books can have different effects on the reader, sometimes happy, sometimes sad. They can open a door that people have never seen before and raise awareness about the things around them. In the book The Outsiders by S.E Hinton, it makes it clear on how books can be sad. The novel The Outsiders has a pessimistic effect on the reader because it exposes conflicts between social classes, struggles of people living in poverty, and shows that sometimes things do not change for the better.

The book talks about the conflicts that go on between social classes. “No rival gang. Only Socs. And you can’t win against them no matter how hard you try, because they’ve got

“Young hoods- who would grow up to be old hoods. I’d never thought about it before, but they’d just get worse as they got older, not better.” The book very well shows that sometimes people, like the Shepard gang or Dallas Winston, just get worse and worse as they grow older, and never change for the better. The fight for self- preservation has hardened them to the point where they have a savage defiance to the world. “I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better.” People who live in these unfourtunate areas, would love to have the chance that many people take for granted. Unfourtunatley, many of times, this never happens and they are stuck living in their miserable conditions. The novel indicates that millions of people are suffering in poverty.

Overall, the book talks a great deal about the struggles and the numerous misfourntunes of millions of people. This connects to the universal theme about poverty, since the book takes place in a poverty striken area of Oklahoma. All in all, the novel has an overall pessimisctic effect on the reader because it exposes conflicts between social classes, struggles of people living in poverty, and shows that sometimes things do not change for the