We all know that the narrator is a big part of any story. I mean you see it in almost every movie and even some TV shows. For example, my all-time favorite TV show Gossip Girl revolves around the fact that there is a narrator a.k.a. “Gossip Girl.” She controls the whole story and pops in at any time needed to explain background detail or to tell the audience a big secret. I mean without the narrator the show wouldn’t have any meaning or anything. This is why I believe a story is best told by the narrator and they need to be credible. “Gossip Girl” gets her facts straight from the source or the people who witnessed it, so as the audience we know whatever she says is credible.
Likewise, in The Outsiders, the story is told from the young kid Ponyboy who I mentioned in my earlier post. Ponyboy is really a great narrator like “Gossip Girl,” everything he says is credible, even though there is a big rivalry between the groups he sees both sides of the story. Ponyboy gives us a point of view that can sometimes be rare, he tells the story as he sees it not leaving out any details, so the reader is constantly up to date and never confused. He tells the story from the side of the Greasers because those are the people he runs with, but unlike the other Greasers he actually feels for the Socs.
“Randy looked at me. ‘No you wouldn’t. I’m a Soc. You get a little money and the whole world hates you.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘you hate the whole world’” (Hinton 117).
From this example alone you can tell that Ponyboy feels for Randy the Soc understanding what Cherry meant when she once said, “things are rough all over” (Hinton 48). The overall function of Ponyboy as a narrator is to be the middle man in the story and let the readers know how it really is out in their world.
Brotherhood 