Does Ponyboy Die: Exploring Grief and its Impact

Introduction

The book Outsiders is a story of grief. For most of the book, someone is grieving someone, but the biggest example of grief is Ponyboy absolutely shutting down because of Johnny’s and Dally’s deaths. He refused to eat and denied that they had ever died. He did poorly on his schoolwork and seemed empty. He forgot things, like his shoes. He was an absolute mess.

Ponyboy's Journey through Grief

Ponyboy likely went through the five stages of grief.

The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. He is seen going through denial when he denies that Johnny ever died. I believe that he took his anger out on Darry when they got into fights. He isn’t really shown going through bargaining, but Dally did show this shortly after Johnny died. He was certainly depressed, as he was sad about Johnny’s death, stopped eating much, and was distracted and empty. He found acceptance when he wrote the paper that would become The Outsiders.

The most common physical expressions of grief are crying, sighing, headaches, loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, weakness, and fatigue. The five stages of grief usually happen to a grieving person, but they aren’t always in order. The only exception is acceptance, which is almost always last. A lot of signs of grief are not physical, such as sadness and yearning. There also may be spiritual effects that may happen to a person going through grief, such as an increase or decrease in faith.

Ponyboy goes through almost all of the effects of grief listed above. I have already written about how Ponyboy went through the five stages of grief, but he also gets largely affected by a loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and fatigue. He rejected everything saying that he didn’t like baloney, even if it wasn’t baloney. That shows his loss of appetite and his unstable state of mind. As I said above, he was a mess.

Conclusion: Personal Experience with Grief

I don’t have much experience with grief myself. The only family member that has died in my lifetime was my grandpa on my dad’s side, but I was less than a year old and didn’t remember it. I have had a few pets die, but I was young when that happened too. The closest that I’ve come to grief was when I found out that my dad was diagnosed with cancer, but that was more fear for his life than grief. He is still here and has been for all of my life, so I didn’t go through grief. I went through many negative emotions then, but grief was not one of them.

References

1. Hinton, S. E. (1967). The Outsiders. Speak.

2. Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Routledge.

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