The Same Sunset

Reading The Outsiders

It began with a musical. The Outsiders had landed on my calendar, and I found myself doing what I usually do when a film or a stage show promises to meet up with a book: I go and read the thing first, so I can work out what I think before someone else’s interpretation gets there ahead of me. I hadn’t read The Outsiders before. It was my daughter who insisted we had to see the show, because the music, she said, was something quite special. And it was that insistence, really, that sent me to S. E. Hinton’s novel.

What struck me straight away was how a key theme about the division in society, if anything, is more relevant now than ever. We live with our own share of misinterpretation and misunderstanding about what each person is, and Hinton was writing about exactly this, decades before our current arguments about who belongs where.

One piece that stayed with me was the book’s expression of common humanity. Yes, people do different things. They hold different ideas about what counts as fun or worthwhile. And yet we are all watching the same sun set. When Ponyboy and Cherry look at the sunset, each from their own side of town, they are looking at the same sky. The colours are identical, whichever side you’re standing on.

That image struck me as particularly relevant just now, when I find myself wondering, again and again, why we are so divisive with one another. It is a conversation that keeps returning, in one form or another.

The other thing that struck me on reading was that this is, quite obviously, a story about teenage angst, about the work of figuring out how to make your way in the world. Ponyboy is a particular kind of person: not entirely sure he fits in, going along with being a Greaser more than fully claiming it. He wants to belong to that identity and that peer group, and yet everyone around him seems to feel it more completely than he does. He pokes his head up. He reads. He talks to Cherry, even though she belongs to a different social group entirely, and it’s in these small departures that you start to feel him working out what makes him distinct.

That progress becomes visible, I think, at the point where he has to shave his hair off, hair that had been the very mark of being a Greaser. Suddenly he doesn’t have it anymore. What does that do to him? What does it make him, now that he is something different from who he was?

As the climax gathers force, we see how each character either identifies fully with the group or is left to stand alone. The perspective about the fighting, about why people fight at all, that captures this beautifully from Ponyboy’s perspective: how you truly need to think about what you’re doing, and how you need to move forward from it, rather than simply falling in line with what the group expects.

All of which is obviously about teenagers, and about the 1960s, and reading it, I did wonder: why am I, a sixty-four-year-old woman, sitting here with a book about teenagers? But I think it extrapolates rather well into the times we’re living through now.

The idea of creating a different identity isn’t really about becoming somebody else. It’s closer to what happens when my own identity, tied for so long to career, or to motherhood, or to any of the roles life hands you, starts to loosen, and I begin thinking about how I need to become more fully myself, or become someone I haven’t quite been before.

So that happened to Ponyboy, in his way, and here I am doing something not so different: no longer only the career person with stories to tell about what she once did, but someone stepping into whatever comes next. Am I becoming the elder, moving forward from that vantage point?

I think that’s the real accomplishment of this book. It still makes you ask who you are, in relation to everything going on around you, whether you’re fourteen or sixty-four. As the seasons of life change, can we stay true, stay gold?

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to old.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay.” (Pg. 61)

Expand Your Understanding

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