Ponyboy Changing

Authors note: This is a character analysis piece about PonyBoy in the book The Outsiders

In the book “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton, a young man named Ponyboy is a fourteen year old on the side of the road. His parents dead when he was young in a car crash leaving him to live with his brothers Soda and Darry. Along with a gang of misfits. To add on to that they’re in a gang war with the Socs, the rich kids that have the world handed to them. Pony’s dream is to become a hood like the rest of his gang. His brother Darry doesn’t like this idea because Pony is smart and athletic, Darry believes that he has a shot at going to college and escaping hood life. Pony starts to relies that being a hood and in a constant gang war you can never win isn’t a good career path. So he decides to change for the better.

As the story progresses Pony changes slowly. He meets a Soc girl at a drive in movie theater named Cherry, he tells how lucky she is to have the world given to her. She replies that she doesn’t have the world made and that sometimes life as a Soc can be as hard as a Greaser and at that point Pony started to have sympathy for the Socs.  realized that everyone has their hardships not just greasers. Another example is when they get to a school house and rush in to save the kids that were trapped in there with his buddy Johnny. The school house starts to collapse, Johnny throws Pony out the window to save his life. Not only did it change the way people viewed Greasers, it made Pony want to help more people.

People can be alter by anything, in this case it was good for Ponyboy  but in the book “Between Shades of Grey” by Ruta Sepetys, a young girl named Lina is living in Lithuania during 1941. The NKVD the Soviet military police start do deport people. Lina and her family are forced to go to Sibera. They do hard Labor for 10 years as the years go on she becomes angry with the soviets and wants to kill all of them for making here go through hard labor. For Pony he charged for the better and ended the gang war between the Greaser and Socs.