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The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed 54
In an interview originally published in 1982, S. E. Hinton said, "It drove me nuts that people would set up social rules and social games and never ask where these rules came from or who was saying they have to do this or that" (qtd. in Commire 98; emphasis in orig.). While it is uncertain whether Hinton understood how social rules get "set up"—that is, how society is ideologically constructed—or whether she consciously intended her novels to provide a space for ideological critique, it is apparent that even as a teenager she questioned the authority attributed to the social system or ideology of her time.1 This essay argues that, consciously or not, Hinton's first novel, The Outsiders (1967), does indeed challenge the classism of 1960s culture in the US by encouraging readers to participate in the protagonist's conscientização, a process of developing critical consciousness of oppression and how it works.2 In a literary version of Paulo Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed," the narrative structure of The Outsiders invites readers to question the picture of society that classist ideology naturalizes, freeing them up to imagine and hope for a world without classist violence.
The Outsiders offers a granular and apparently realistic window into life in a classist environment from the perspective of an underclass person. The autodiegetic narrator of The Outsiders is Ponyboy Curtis, a fourteen-year-old boy whose parents have recently died; he lives with his two older brothers on the east—that is, the poor—side of town. Already socialized (indoctrinated) into his cultural environment, Ponyboy recounts his experience of classist inequality as a driving force in his life, from the first time that he is assaulted by a group of upper-class boys called Socs, "the jet-set, the West-side rich kids" (4), through escalating conflict steeped in class divisions and increasing awareness that classism and its violence are not inevitable facts of life. At the end of the novel, Ponyboy has a moment of critical understanding, a quantum leap in his view of his situation, which allows him to break free of his self-image as a victim and to engage his agency. Inspired...