The Outsiders: What's the Buzz 40 Years Later?

by Keith Neilitz, English licensure candidate at Silver Lake College

            S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders has been a cultural phenomenon since it was first published in 1967.  Many critics maintain that it is the first young adult novel ever published.  The plot is relatively simple and straightforward.  Based in an unnamed city in Oklahoma, the story focuses on two rival groups that are at constant odds with one another.  The Greasers, a brotherhood of lower-class status teenagers, are routinely at the mercy of the Socs, a group of upper-class rich kids.  Despite the uncomplicated plot, the intensity, passion, and realism of the story captivate the reader’s attention to a degree that previous novels failed to do.  Aside from being written over forty years ago, the novel continues to be read, taught, and praised by instructors and students alike.  The essential question that is routinely contemplated by critics is why the novel has persevered for so long and continued to captivate young adult readers.  

            Perhaps the most significant reason that the novel has maintained popularity for so long is the quintessential realism of the plot that a young adult reader can relate to.  For example, the story wrestles with the tension between two rival groups that are constantly fighting.  Despite the narrator including a liberal dose of violence and brutality, the reader can easily relate to the idea of the formation of cliques during adolescence.  In addition, many of the feelings and transitions that young adult readers experience in their own lives are present throughout the novel.  Themes such as the loss of innocence, struggles with identity, anger, resentment, and feeling lost in an unpleasant world all contribute to the realistic aspects that young adults typically experience. 

            Two additional features of the novel The Outsiders that have captivated young adults for decades are the narrator’s inclusion of unbridled action and the exclusion of unnecessary details.  The novel includes a variety of highly charged events that maintain the interest of the reader.  For instance, the novel begins with a violent episode that foreshadows many events of remainder of the book.   As the novel unravels, the narrator provides brief, yet seminal information about relationships between members of the two groups, family dynamics, and character attributes.  However, the narrator eschews bombarding the reader with excessive details, and thus, the novel progresses without becoming cumbersome or tedious. 

            The Outsiders has maintained unprecedented longevity within the genre of young adult literature because of the writer’s incorporation of convincing realism, description of feelings and experiences relevant to the reader, and the inclusion of rousing action.  The plot features two rival groups that exude continuous hostility, which speaks candidly to young readers as it parallels the factions that develop during adolescence.  Moreover, the narrator’s interpolation of persistent action elicits the reader’s desire to ascertain subsequent events of the plot.  And finally, the novel maintains the interest of the reader by excluding details that would hinder the continuity of the story.  

Keith Neilitz has an undergraduate degree in Behavioral Science and Law and a Masters degree in Psychology.  However, his passion for literature has led him to reenroll in academia at Silver Lake College to procure a teaching certification license in English.

Exalting Everyday Miracles: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney

by Elizabeth Fritsch, senior English major at Silver Lake College

Seamus Heaney is probably one of the most well-known Irish writers of the last century.  Heaney published numerous volumes of poetry and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.  The Nobel Prize Committee described Heaney’s works as “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."  Heaney’s poems focus heavily on Irish topography, culture and heritage.

I first experienced Heaney’s poetry in the World Literature class I took as a college freshman.  Though I generally dislike poets who focus on nature in their poetry, I found Heaney’s approach to writing about nature to be a breath of fresh air.  Heaney’s ability to use the natural world to speak about the human experience is remarkable and captivating.   

Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939 and was one of nine children.  He attended Queen’s University Belfast where he studied English Language and Literature.  He later was a Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry.  In addition to writing poetry, Heaney also translated works, most notably Beowulf.  Heaney died on August 30, 2013. 

“Digging” is one of Heaney’s most popular poems.  In “Digging,” Heaney compares the laborious work of working a field to the act of writing.  Both require an individual to “dig.”

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb  

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound  

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:  

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds  

Bends low, comes up twenty years away  

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills  

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft  

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.  

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

As with many of his poems, “Blackberry-Picking” is heavily focused on the natural world and what can be learned by engaging with our environment.  Readers can almost taste the blackberries plucked in Heaney’s poem.  Readers also simultaneously experience youthful pleasure and disappointment that comes with maturity.  Heaney’s language is sensual and detailed, allowing the experience of blackberry-picking to come alive for the reader.

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Elizabeth Fritsch is a senior majoring
in English (teaching emphasis) and minoring
in History and Theology.  Her favorite poem
by Heaney is "The Plantation."

On Dr. Zhivago

By Thomas Resch, senior history major and English minor at Silver Lake College

Despite the fact that I’m writing this for an English Department, I’m not actually going to write about anything I’ve read, and not even a book, but rather a movie, and an exceptionally good movie at that: Dr. Zhivago (1965).  However, this is not a film review either; Dr. Zhivago has much to tell us about literature and reading and the writer’s craft, and even the life of a reader, for it tells the life of a poet.  At over three hours in length, the film has much room for many plot twists and abrupt changes in the lives of the characters, but the plot in essence is quite simple: a Soviet general in a 1950’s setting is seeking the daughter of his long deceased half-brother, Dr. Yuri Zhivago.  The film then goes on to describe the long series of events which lead up to Zhivago meeting Lara at a World War I field hospital, Zhivago’s marriage to Tonya, and his eventual rediscovery of Lara in a village in the Ural mountains, leading to an affair. As though being caught between the love of his wife Tonya and his affections for Lara were not cruel enough on the gentle-hearted Yuri, he is also caught up in the dehumanizing, cruel forces of the Russian Revolution, which proves to be an everlasting sword of fate over his life.

Thus, Dr. Zhivago is essentially a flashback, a glimpse into the past lives of the characters.  In the film, this flashback is lived through windows: characters are repeatedly viewed through panes of glass, or else one character may even be watching another character, so that the audience is ultimately watching someone watch someone else through a window.  It is through these windows that we can view another world, a world nonetheless unattainable to us.  The glass is a transparent but impassable barrier: you may look, but may not touch.  And is this not what literature does to the reader? Does not every poem, play, or novel place us symbolically before a window into another world? They are windows also into the souls of the characters, human beings like us, albeit fictional, but human nonetheless, who experience all that life offers: love, joy, loss, sorrow.  Through literature we can share in their lives by the viewing, but still remain bystanders only: we cannot physically experience these characters. The window appears to be unbreakable, but must it be broken at all…?

In a later scene of Dr. Zhivago, after his wife and son have left for Paris, he is left hiding in his old childhood home with Lara, passing the long Russian winter in solitude.  When they first enter the house, the pair passes through several halls, and the viewer is led each time through a glass door, until the last room is entered.  Here, Zhivago is filled with visible emotion and joy, as he finds an old desk, upon which, he explains to Lara, he learnt to write.  As the days wear on, Zhivago, reunited with his beloved Lara, finds himself writing love poetry in nocturnal bursts of inspiration. He does this despite all the cruelty and hate and confusion surrounding him in revolutionary Russia.  In this dehumanizing situation, in which Zhivago was told that the “personal life is dead,” even having his earlier poetry condemned as “personal” and “petty,” the poet, by taking up his pen, boldly affirms his life and humanity.  By this creative act, by gushing forth his passions, Zhivago proclaims that the personal life is more alive than ever!  His poetry becomes his personal life, indeed, it becomes his very self, his soul and his humanity, as his deepest, innermost thoughts and feelings are immortalized in bold, black ink.  Thus written, it is now a window into, and even a mirror of, Zhivago’s soul. We, the reader, having viewed this baring of humanity, it then becomes ensconced in our consciousness and our memory, and lives on in us through the sharing.  There is no need to break through the window after all, for no barrier can prevent such a communication of soul to soul and heart to heart.

Thomas Resch is currently a senior studying for his bachelor's degree in history, with minors in English and theology. He resides near Manitowoc.