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Copywork
About This Passage
This is one of the quietest, most important paragraphs in the whole novel. Hinton has just put Ponyboy and Johnny inside Buck Merril's house — loud music, a drunk cowboy, a murder rap behind them — and instead of speeding up the action, she stops the chapter cold so Ponyboy can really look at Dally for the first time. Notice the order Hinton uses. She gives us the outside first (towheaded, shifty-eyed, anything but handsome), and only then the inside (character, pride, savage defiance). The last sentence is the saddest one: 'The fight for self-preservation had hardened him beyond caring.' That is Hinton telling the reader that Dally's hardness is not who he was born to be — it is the price he has paid to stay alive. The whole rest of the chapter, where Dally hands over the jacket and the money and softly says 'Take care, kid,' has to be read against this paragraph.
As Johnny told him the story, I studied Dally, trying to figure out what there was about this tough-looking hood that a girl like Cherry Valance could love. Towheaded and shifty-eyed, Dally was anythi...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Tell Chapter 4 in your own words. Begin with Ponyboy and Johnny in the cold park at two-thirty in the morning, follow the blue Mustang circling and the five drunk Socs surrounding them at the fountain, walk through Bob's words ('white trash with long hair') and Ponyboy spitting back, describe Ponyboy being held under the fountain water and waking on the pavement to find Johnny saying 'I killed him,' move through the boys' run to Buck Merril's to find Dally, list the things Dally gives them (a gun, fifty dollars, a too-big shirt, his own brown leather jacket, instructions for the train and the church), and end with the meadow lark dawn, the lie to the farmer, and the boys falling asleep on the cold stone church floor.
Discussion Questions
- What in the story shows that Bob and his friends are looking for revenge before any words are spoken? List two things you notice in the text before Bob says his first 'Hey, greasers.'
- How can you tell from the passage that Dally is taking care of Ponyboy and Johnny, even though he sounds rough? Name three specific things Dally does for them inside Buck's house.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Looked at carefully for a long time in order to understand something better
Item 2
Good-looking; pleasing to the eye, especially of a man or boy
Item 3
The qualities inside a person — like courage, honesty, or stubbornness — that make them who they are
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Critical Thinking
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