The Outsiders — Chapter 6

About This Passage

This is one of the most psychologically interesting sentences Hinton has given Ponyboy in the entire novel so far. He is inside a burning church. The roof is on fire above him; the floor will collapse soon; the cinders are falling on his skin. By every rational measure he should be panicking. Instead he reports a strange clarity: 'I should be scared, I thought with an odd detached feeling, but I'm not.' That sentence is the calm of somebody whose ordinary self has stepped out of the way and let some deeper self take over. Notice Hinton's craft. She gives Pony a writer's mind even in the middle of a crisis: he notices the cinders 'stinging and smarting like ants,' he notices the 'red glow and the haze' (her image-making does not stop in a fire), and he even has time for an interior literary thought — 'I remembered wondering what it was like in a burning ember' — that loops back on itself with self-aware wonder: 'Now I know, it's a red hell.' These are the sentences of a sensitive, observing kid who, even in extremity, cannot stop being a writer. The chapter is also doing something theological with the phrase 'red hell.' Hinton has positioned this fire on Jay Mountain, in a church, and given Pony a moment of detached calm that almost reads like grace. The fire that should have terrified him has instead given him, briefly, a kind of unselfed serenity — as though he has crossed a threshold from boyhood into something larger. Notice, too, the question at the end. 'Why aren't I scared?' Hinton lets Pony ask it but does not answer it. The answer is not given because the answer is the rest of the chapter — and, more largely, the rest of the book. Pony is not scared because, in this moment, he has stopped being a frightened individual and become somebody whose body is acting on behalf of children he does not know. That selflessness is the doorway to the calm.

Narration Prompt

Tell Chapter 6 in your own words. Begin with Dally driving Pony and Johnny back from the church and revealing that Cherry Valance has become a spy for the greasers, willing to testify that the Socs were drunk and looking for a fight. Tell about the meal at the Dairy Queen, Johnny's surprise announcement that he is going to turn himself in, and the painful exchange with Dally about Johnny's parents — the parents who have not asked about him. Tell about Dally's pleading voice in the car — the only soft voice Dally uses in the entire book — and his three-word confession: 'Like it happened to me.' Then arrive at the top of Jay Mountain, where the church is on fire and a school picnic has gone wrong. Tell about the missing children, the faint yelling from inside, Pony smashing the window with a rock, Johnny tossing children through the window one at a time, the timber falling on Johnny, and Dally clubbing Pony's burning back to put out the flames. End with the ambulance, Jerry the schoolteacher, the hospital, Soda's bear hug, and the climactic moment when Pony sees Darry — strong, controlled Darry, who did not cry at his own parents' funeral — sobbing in the doorway. The chapter closes: 'I had taken the long way around, but I was finally home. To stay.'

Discussion Questions

1. When Pony writes that Dally spoke 'in a pleading, high voice, using a tone I had never heard from him before,' he immediately follows it with the line 'Dally never talked like that. Never.' What is Hinton revising about Dally for the reader? How does this scene reframe everything we have seen Dally do up to this point in the novel — his cussing, his refusal to feel, his cruelty with Cherry, his record with the law?
2. Pony writes that he should have been scared in the burning church but felt instead 'an odd detached feeling.' Hinton repeatedly shows characters in this novel finding their truest selves under extreme pressure (Johnny in the fire, Dally's begging voice, Darry's tears). What is the chapter — and the book — claiming about the relationship between extremity and authenticity? Does extreme pressure reveal who someone really is, or does it create a different self entirely?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide