SE Hinton's seminal first novel, The Outsiders, is widely recognized as the birth of contemporary fiction for adolescents. While JD Salinger is often considered the first writer to truly capture the modern adolescent mindset sixteen years earlier (albeit in a work aimed at adult readers) with his legendary novel The Catcher in the Rye, c He was Hinton, a tomboyish high school student. from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who took the teenage voice and presented it in an even more palpable, visceral and realistic way that even spoiled and whiny Holden Caulfield could never imitate. She achieves this voice through her characters. Hinton's greasers are rowdy, downtrodden, and more than a little flawed; they embody a youthful vigor and a powerful sense of poignant world-weariness, unknown in children's literature before Hinton's time. And yet, whether by design or through lack of writing experience, Hinton's characters, despite their overwhelming modernity, fit perfectly into the archetypes that were prevalent in literary reconstructions of childhood over the past few centuries. My goal is to determine how the characters in The Outsiders fit into these traditional historical models of childhood and also how Hinton uses these models to both summarize and subvert the Western canon and create unique modern literature for a new generation young readers. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay Among these historical models, perhaps the most famous is the concept of the “romantic child.” This model revolves around the belief that children are “the embodiment of innocence” (Hintz 15). When it comes to The Outsiders, the most obvious candidate for this model is the character Johnny. Johnny is described as sweet, shy and introverted, the complete opposite of his fellow Greasers. Hinton describes him as “a little brown puppy who has been kicked too many times and gets lost in a crowd of strangers” (Hinton 11). While characters like Dally lash out angrily against an unjust world, Johnny internalizes the injustice he experienced and withdraws further into himself out of fear. However, instead of becoming harsh and bitter, Johnny manages to maintain his decency, as illustrated when he saves the children from the burning church in Chapter 6. This sacrificial act ultimately leads to his death, after which Hinton almost elevates him to the rank of martyr. like status. It is through his final appeal to Ponyboy to “remain the gold” – a reference to a poem by Robert Frost mentioned earlier in the novel – that Johnny fulfills his role as a symbol of lost innocence. of childhood (149). the character of Dally functions as an extreme contrast to Johnny. While Johnny embodies innate innocence and virtue despite the cruelty of the world around him, Dally represents the natural depravity of an unruly child, a prime example of the "sinful child" model found in Puritan ideology . He is a full-fledged victim of his environment, and is described by Hinton as having "blue, blazing, cold [eyes] and a hatred of the whole world" (10). He follows a strict Machiavellian philosophy, stating: "be tough like me and you won't get hurt." You take care of yourself and nothing can harm you [...]” (147). Dally is a pretty extreme example of what a child can do when left to his own self-destructive tendencies. Ponyboy Curtis, the novel's narrator, is a little harder to pin down, but one could argue that he fits neatly into the category of ".