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Examples Of Provocations In The Outsiders

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Provocations: Who’s Really Guilty in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders? Imagine you lived in a place where you always had to watch your back and there was always another brutal enemy. The only way to survive was through violence, as if you were born with a knife. S.E. Hinton depicted this world in her novel The Outsiders. She wrote about two feuding teenage gangs; the Socs, who were “the West-side rich kids” (page 2), and the Greasers, who were poor. The rivalry between the two groups ran deep and the question surfaces: who is to blame for the conflict? Although the book is written from the perspective of the Greasers, and the Socs are shown as the bad guys, there is a case to be made that the conflicts in the book started with the Greasers. The first piece of trouble comes when Dally, one of the Greasers, picks on a Soc named Cherry at the movies. “He started talking, loud enough for the two girls to hear. He started out bad and got worse” (page 20). Dally’s actions were unprovoked. He just …show more content…

They began arguments impulsively, and not always as part of their feud with the Socs. One example of this occurred when Dally robbed a grocery store in a period of despair after a Greaser named Johnny died. Dally notified his fellow Greasers after the crime and they responded in panic, feeling that they “gotta hide him” (page 153). The other Greasers encouraged Dally’s evasion of the cops, becoming accomplices to the crime. The cops pursued and shot Dally, fatally, when he acted as if he was about to shoot them. This part of the downward spiral of events in the book began with Dally’s impulsiveness in the grocery store, not with the feud or with fury. Ponyboy even admitted that Dally was an unstable person, saying, “he died violent and young and desperate, just like we all knew he’d die someday” (page 154). This proves that even the Greasers see that they are liable to cause turmoil in any

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