Stay Gold
This is a short paragraph about the meaningful lesson which is taught in the book The Outsiders.
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton is about a teenager named Ponyboy and his struggles with gang violence, poverty, and family conflict. Ponyboy lives a hard life because he is a greaser. Greasers are poor and they live on the East side of town while the Socs are rich and live on the West side. Greasers are rough people who like to smoke cigarettes, keep their hair long and greasy, and get in trouble with the fuzz. However the Socs are not all innocent either but they don’t get into trouble because they got money and a good economic status. Ponyboy is a greaser but he is different from the rest. He likes books and movies, gets good grades in school and he is the type of person who likes to watch sunsets. S.E. Hinton also makes it a point to tell us that Ponyboy doesn’t like to use knives and he doesn’t really get along with the rowdier members of the gang. Ponyboy’ s very close friend Johnny accidentally murder’s someone’s one night while trying to save Ponyboy and they have to run away. Ponyboy and Johnny leave town and hide out in a church in Windrixville for about a week. Later in the story Ponyboy and Johnny save little children from a burning church. During that Johnny gets badly injured and has to be in the hospital. On his deathbed Johnny says to Ponyboy, “Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold…”(Hinton 148). These words were in a poem by Robert Frost that Ponyboy recited to Johnny when they were in the Windrixville church. The poem said that nothing gold can stay meaning that all good things must come to an end. For example, when Johnny and Ponyboy were hiding in the church they would read, talk and smoke. They got to escape their responsibilities from the real world but as all good things come to an end the boys also had to face their consequences eventually. By telling Ponyboy to stay gold, Johnny wanted him to hold on to his golden qualities which made him different from the rest and he wanted Pony to remain innocent because Johnny knew that Ponyboy was too good to be a hood. He also wanted Ponyboy to keep on appreciating the great moments in life like the sunset because in his letter he writes, “Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That’s gold. Keep that way, it’s a good way to be”(Hinton 178). Also Johnny tells Pony to show Dally the sunsets. So he also wants Ponyboy to share the “gold” with everyone. Ponyboy is not meant to be hard and cold like Dally or Tim Shepard and that is what Johnny is teaching Ponyboy. The environment that Ponyboy lives in would make it easy for him to be changed into someone like Dally so Johnny wants him to keep those positive qualities and keep looking for the good in life and share them so one day life will be better. At the end Ponyboy learns to move on and he finally understands that there will always be hard times in life but you just have to learn to find the good moments and stay gold.