Sara

The Outsiders

As I think back on the book,The Outsiders, it catches up to me how the theme of this book relates to the modern day world. Even though The Outsiders was written a long time ago. there are problems that will stay the same in our world forever. I really liked the focus of this book, and I enjoyed reading what this author had to say. The theme of this book was to always stay gold, or in more understandable words staying young and innocent. Realising that we aren’t going to live forever. Or never growing up, always being energetic, fun loving people. Just like little kids, never over complicating things and living simple lives. Also staying innocent, and not getting into all of the elaborate drama that adults sometimes get. Not getting caught up in all of the gangs and the fights that the greasers have, but staying pure and curious.

Comparing this book to the movie, I see quite a few similarities. One of the ways that the movie is similar to the book is, I envisioned the fight in the book, when I read it, exactly how it was executed in the movie. They were all beat up really bad, but in the end they won, and celebrated because they didn’t care if the got beat up till they died, all they really wanted to do was beat the Socs in the fight. They accomplished their task of winning the fight and it made them overjoyed, to them it was like winning the olympics when you’re the least expected team to get past the first round.  and feel the sweet taste of victory. Another way that I saw how the book and the movie where similar was in the scene when the church burned down, both the movie and the book had this scene explained really well. They had the teacher who lost her kids in the church, and all of her students running around. It happened exactly how the book described it, there where kids inside and they ran in and rescued them. In the process Johnny got hit in the back with a wood plank from the roof. Johnny got majorly burnt and eventually died, in both the movie and the book. I think that Dally was the perfect actor for his role, because he was almost exactly how the book described him, he had the same role in the movie as in the book. Johnny was also very well-played by the actor he looked very much like him, and even talked like I imagined. Two-Bit also looks very much similar to what the book described, he was kind of like the cool kid, with his hair slicked back and everything. Sodapop was also much as I imagined, very popular, and looked up to by everyone.

Some things in the movie that aren’t similar to the book are, Ponyboy didn’t fight nearly as much with Darry in the movie as in the book. When I read the book I thought that there would always be some tension between them. They would be fighting continuously throughout the movie, until the end when Sodapop tells them not to fight, but that didn’t really happen. I also didn’t really like the way that the ending in the movie didn’t tell you why he was writing the story. In the book it explains that he’s a very good student, which is never hardly mentioned in the movie, and he was actually writing this book for one of his classes. I don’t think that ponyboy was a really good actress for his role in the movie, I imagined him being very much smaller and shorter than the rest of them, because that’s what the book describes. In the movie he’s pretty much the same height and looked the same age as everyone else. Dally wasn’t quite as I expected either, he wasn’t as angry or stressed in the movie as was described in the book.

I don’t really agree with the setting that the movie directors chose. Especially for the church scene, because it was nothing like the book described. The book also described their house being nice and neat and clean, and it wasn’t really like that in the movie. I also disagree with the way that they didn’t really mention the fact that ponyboy was really good in school or, that the book was even written for school. I also didn’t like how cheesy it was when the Socs and the greasers met, it just seemed almost like a joke, In the book when I read it to myself that’s not at all what I thought of. I didn’t think of two kid sitting in a car very awkwardly talking. I thought of them just chatting it up. You wouldn’t even realise that it was the first time they really talked to each other, more like they had been best friends for years and they were just having a regular conversation.

In the end it was a good book that really captured the reader. It had many intense parts that lead to a lot of thought. I really enjoyed the way that it started and ended, it was a very creative twist that the author added into the book and movie. I also enjoyed that the movie did pretty well at following the book. It wasn’t perfectly word for word, but you need to keep the movie going somehow. No movie is perfectly the same as the book, because someone else could’ve imagined something different than what another persons mind imagines, That’s how God created us, that’s why no two papers that a teacher reads are going to be the same. In the end, it’s a great book that you will keep on thinking about for the next couple days after you finish it pondering all of the intense action that this book provided. I liked reading The Outsiders for school. Even though it was difficult to understand at times it got the theme of the book across to the reader very well.