The Sensitive Outsider

Catcher in the Rye, Seventeenth Summer, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings all feature protagonists who, consciously and unconsciously, value sensitivity and sensation. These works, which undoubtedly influenced the explicitly “young adult” literature which began some years later, started a trend in which the young adult narrator constructs their difference from others in large part through the ways in which they see the world. Holden sees little-to-no genuineness in a world of misguided and bothersome phonies, and opts out of reality in favor of his dissatisfaction and idealism. Angie seems to spend hours of every day observing phenomena of the outside world, whether describing nature or critiquing the conspicuously shallow actions of many of her peers. Marguerite’s sensitivity is also of paramount importance, as it is through her senses that she explains the world.

In The Outsiders we meet the fully realized puzzle that these other pieces were building to. Ponyboy not only defies the expectations of his peers with his sensitivity and honest conviction, but he surprises the readers as well. We expect a hardened, rude teen, full of angst and rage for his painful upbringing and difficult, violent present. Instead, we yet again see a boy who focuses on little details like color and shape and smell: whose optimism can only be matched by his softness and ability to see the beauty in the world. Ponyboy is an outsider among outsiders. He faces alienation for his class status and past while also struggling with his inner conflict of maintaining his golden soul in a tarnishing, harsh, and hardening society. Hinton layers Ponyboy’s otherness to great success and keeps in line with the character tropes of early books which have since become what we know as young adult literature. With The Outsiders, Hinton creates the inevitably sensitive outsider which continues to pervade nearly every work of young adult literature to this day, with its vast supply of detail oriented writers and poets and thinkers who see the world just like Ponyboy.