SE Hinton's seminal first novel, The Outsiders, is widely recognized as the birth of contemporary adolescent fiction. While J.D. Salinger is often seen as the first writer to truly capture the modern adolescent mentality sixteen years earlier (albeit in a work aimed at adult readers) with his legendary novel The Catcher in the Rye, it was Hinton, a tomboyish high school student from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who took the voice of the teenager and presented it in a way even more palpable, visceral and realistic, than even the spoiled and whiny Holden Caulfield could ever imitate. He achieves this voice through his characters. Hinton's greasers are rowdy, downtrodden, and more than a little flawed; they embody a youthful vigor and a powerful sense of touching world-weariness unheard of in children's literature before Hinton's time. Yet, whether intentional or due to lack of writing experience, Hinton's characters, despite their overwhelming modernity, fit perfectly into the archetypes that had been prevalent in literary reconstructions of childhood over the past few centuries. My goal is to determine how the characters in The Outsiders fit into these traditional historical models of childhood and also how Hinton uses these models to encapsulate and subvert the Western canon and create uniquely modern literature for a new generation of young readers. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Of these historical models, perhaps the most famous is the concept of the “romantic child.” This model revolves around the belief that children are “the embodiment of innocence” (Hintz 15). In terms of The Outsiders, the most obvious candidate for this model is the character of Johnny. Johnny is portrayed as meek, shy and introverted, quite the opposite of his fellow Greasers. Hinton describes him as “a little dark puppy who has been kicked too many times and got lost in a crowd of strangers” (Hinton 11). While characters like Dally lash out in anger at an unjust world, Johnny internalizes the injustice he has experienced and retreats further into himself out of fear. However, instead of becoming hard and bitter, Johnny manages to maintain his decency, as illustrated by his rescue of the children from the burning church in chapter 6. This sacrificial act ultimately leads to his death, after which Hinton elevates him to near-martyrdom . like the state. It is through his final plea to Ponyboy to "[stay] gold" – a reference to a Robert Frost poem discussed earlier in the novel – that Johnny fulfills his role as a symbol of lost childhood innocence (149). Dally's character functions as an extreme contrast to Johnny. While Johnny comes to embody innate innocence and virtue despite the cruelty of the world around him, Dally represents the natural depravity of an unruly child, a prime example of the “sinful child” model found in Puritan ideology. He is a true victim of his environment, and is described by Hinton as having "blue, flaming, cold [eyes] with a hatred for the whole world" (10). He follows a strict Machiavellian philosophy, stating: “get tough like me and you won't get hurt. Take care of yourself and nothing can touch you [....]” (147). Dally is a rather extreme example of what a child can do if left to his own self-destructive tendencies. Ponyboy Curtis, the novel's narrator, is a little harder to define, but one could argue that he fits well into the category of the "developing child," or a child who "[exists] along a continuum of development with.