The Outsiders — Chapter 5

About This Passage

This brief passage is one of Hinton's quietest indictments of American schooling, and one of her most generous portraits of a working-class mind. The narrator-Pony, who has been positioned by the gang and by his teachers as 'the deep one,' performs an act of revision in real time: he watches Johnny — labeled dumb by adults, failed by the system, beaten by his parents — find more in Gone with the Wind than Pony himself can. The diction is exact. Hinton does not say Johnny was actually slow; she says his teachers thought he was. She names two cognitive realities at once: Johnny cannot 'grasp anything that was shoved at him too fast,' and Johnny 'liked to explore things once he did get them.' Those are two halves of a single mind that the school system has read as deficiency rather than disposition. The passage is also doing something subtle with literary fascination: Johnny, who has never been treated like a gentleman, is moved by the Southern gentlemen of the novel — by manners and charm directed outward, by a code that says how to treat other people. He is finding, inside fiction, a model of dignity he has never been offered in real life. The chapter is asking the reader to notice that the kid who 'fails' school may be, in private, the most attentive reader in the room — and to ask what kind of school could fail to find that out.

Narration Prompt

Tell Chapter 5 in your own words. Begin with Pony waking alone in the cold church and finding Johnny's note in the dust. Walk through Johnny's return with supplies, the haircut and bleaching scene as forced disguise that doubles as state-style erasure of greaser identity, and Pony's loaded statement that hair was 'the one thing we were proud of.' Then move to the night cry where Johnny says, 'There sure is a lot of blood in people,' and Pony comforts him 'like Soda had held him,' before the roles reverse. Cover the four or five days of reading Gone with the Wind aloud, Johnny's surprising depth of literary response, his hero-worship of Dally as 'gallant,' and Pony's pivotal admission that 'Dally was so real he scared me.' Tell about the dawn-watching, the Frost recitation, and Johnny's recognition: 'That was what I meant.' End with Dally's arrival in Buck's T-bird, Sodapop's letter, the Dairy Queen, and the news that Tulsa is now in all-out warfare with Cherry Valance spying for the greasers.

Discussion Questions

1. Pony writes that Johnny 'couldn't grasp anything that was shoved at him too fast' but 'liked to explore things once he did get them,' yet his teachers 'thought he was just plain dumb.' Analyze this passage as a critique of how American schooling reads working-class adolescents. What does Hinton imply by giving the most thoughtful literary response in the chapter to the boy the institution has labeled a failure?
2. The chapter encloses an unusually quiet five-day stretch — reading aloud, sunrises, a poem — between two acts of violence: Bob's death at the close of Chapter 4 and the city-wide warfare reported at the close of Chapter 5. What is the structural meaning of this enclosed gentleness? How does Hinton use the placement of stillness within violence to make a thematic claim about whose lives are allowed to contain peace, and on what terms?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide