Introducing The Outsiders
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&#8220;It seems like there&#8217;s gotta be someplace without greasers and Socs, with just people. Plain ordinary people.&#8221;
Ponyboy Curtis has an unusual name. He likes the name because his father gave it to him, but he hates having to defend it when introducing himself. Pony is 14, and beginning to realize that life is full of contradictions; right down to his core. Life begins clean and unstained, in body and mind; a seed of boundless potential tangled up in a snarled soil of stunted possibilities. From the moment it begins it is losing its polish, commencing its descent toward an inevitable decay. In the tide of random circumstance, each life is marked and altered, irrevocably, by every rock met in the path. Rules and expectations pile up like dirt on a casket, and we are changed and chained to destinies we never chose — often without noticing. Pony has started to notice.
Eight months ago, Pony&#8217;s parents died in a car accident, and now a life that once asserted a semblance of stability and sense is sliding into nebulous insecurity. The world is quick to disseminate various roles it expects him to play, but how can they know him when he hardly knows himself? One moment he&#8217;s telling a pretty girl he could never use a weapon and the next he&#8217;s desperate for anything to put to the purpose. Is he an honors student? A poet and artist? A social delinquent, thug, or accessory to murder? There are days he can stand and fight with the men, and others he just needs to be carried to bed. Somehow, each reflection remains true despite its incongruities. Ponyboy became an orphan, altering the trajectory of his life indelibly, while still remaining the person his parents raised him to be. Yet now he&#8217;s left with only his brothers and a gang of hooligan friends to guage how to become a man in this world of uncertainty and unfairness, imagination and untarnished beauty, imposed roles and innate passions, of heroes and villains who are often one and the same.
Pony and his gang live in a modest-sized city with highly-defined class distinctions. The wealthy elite who reside in the up-scale district on the west end are known as the &#8220;Socials&#8221;, while the impoverished eastern sphere are called &#8220;greasers&#8221;; names that serve as both badge of honor and insult, according to the source. There&#8217;s a culture on the east side that&#8217;s unknown in the west. Greasers know how to stay alive. There are unbreakable bonds, unspoken alliances, time-honored codes-of-conduct. Friends closer than blood kin and associates you can trust with your life just for being part of the tribe. There is a purity and a purpose for greasers. But there are also overarching social structures and laws that disregard the course reality of this rough-shod world. Straight lines that superimpose themselves atop the untamed bramble of east-side ethics by the unseen hand of a foreign overseer. Encircling bars, both physical and intangible, devouring souls at all levels of society.
Financially and culturally, Socials have the advantage, but nearly everything about their lives is given and determined. The elites will always win the game of life because the game is rigged in their favor. There is a place for them in the larger world, and a future — but it is handed down to them largely unearned; an empty victory with nothing to offer that they did not already posses. And they rage in defiance of the hollowness of their privilege. They, too, have blood in their veins and something to prove.
As tensions build, Pony will face death, and threats greater than death, and find out how messy life can get and whether purity can survive. With one foot in both worlds, Pony sees the cards stacked against him along with the virtues he could never relinquish. And together with his friend Johnny, he&#8217;s awakening to the darkness invading everything, and those turning toward a whisper of light they desperately wish to remember. Where others only see greasers and Socials, Ponyboy Curtis is beginning to get a glimpse of ordinary people.
-Jordan Leigh