Johnny And Pony In John Hinton's The Outsiders

The title of them novel The Outsiders relates to the 2 of the main characters in the book. Two characters that largely relate to this are Johnny Cade and Ponyboy Curtis. Johnny and Pony are very different from the rest of the gang. Johnny and Pony are both characters that do not act or feel like the rest of the gang. They are much more similar to each other than the gang. Their differences cause them to be like outsiders to the gang which largely relates to the title The Outsiders.
The members in the gang are Dally Winston, Darry Curtis, Steve Randle, SodaPop Curtis, Two-Bit, Johnny, and Pony. All of the members of the gang, excluding Johnny and Pony, have a hard time understanding and relating to Johnny and Pony. Most of the gang enjoys fighting, stealing, and being rude, this is shown when Pony says “In New York, …show more content…
Although Johnny is not very smart he can be very intelligent if he is taught the right way. Pony realizes this when he reads to him, he says “He couldn’t grasp anything that was shoved at him too fast, and I guess his teachers thought he was plain dumb”(Hinton #75). Also, like Pony, Johnny does not like fighting. Another difference is that if threatened Johnny will use a weapon if he absolutely has to. One last difference is Johnny’s behavior, at the beginning of the novel he is very depressed and even suicidal. After they saved the children from the fire, Johnny realized that he could still be good and that even though he was going to die he knew that he saved lives that had much more potential for success than his. He told Pony that in the note he wrote when he was dieing. In the note Johnny had said “Their lives are worth more than mine, they have more to live for” (Hinton #178). Through this he realized that Pony also had much more potential than him, this was when he accepted his fate. Those are ways that Johnny is different from the gang and