Character Names in The Outsiders - #1

The lyrics do not really represent anything about the character of Ponyboy in The Outsiders. The lyric’s point of view is a 3rd Person narrator/storyteller but the chorus becomes dialogue from the girl(s) who love the Pony Boy.

Way out west in a nest from the rest dwelt the best-est little bronco boy

He could ride, he could glide o’er the prairies like an arrow.

Ev’ry maid in the glade was afraid he would trade his little heart away,

So each little peach made a nice little speech of love to him:

“Pony Boy, Pony Boy, won’t you be my tony boy?

Don’t say no. Here we go off across the plains.

Marry me, carry me, right away with you.

Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up – WHOA! My Pony Boy!”

Till one day, out that way, so they say, came to stay a fluffy ruffle girl.

She made eyes, she surprised, and he found his heart was lasoed.

When he thought he was caught how he fought but she taught this pony boy to love.

But he balked when she talked of a trip to New York, so she sang to him:

“Pony Boy, Pony Boy, won’t you be my tony boy?

Don’t say no. Here we go off across the plains.

Marry me, carry me, right away with you.

Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up – WHOA! My Pony Boy!”

Can’t you just see how a child would love the constant internal rhymes? Can’t you just see the physicality of play in the “giddy-up” and “WHOA!” line? Kids loved this song. When I showed this to my students, they wanted to sing it – and we did.

If someone wanted to write a novel about the Pony Boy of the song, it would be a wild rodeo boy the ladies couldn’t tame until he met a New York society girl and everything changed, with a conflict about not wanting to go to New York with her. Does he visit the Big Apple? Will he stay? Will they return to the West instead? Do they break up? What will ‘whoa’ mean in each stage of the story?

So the inspiration is not really the character; it’s just a name Hinton wanted for her hero.

I used to teach S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders to my 7th Graders every year, and I really hope that it doesn’t fall into the circus of replacing novels due to... reasons. Please, get new novels with diverse characters or authors, but please do not replace this title! The girls in my class loved this book and the characters, and the boys were invested so much with the plot and characters that they couldn’t wait to get to English class to discuss it. I’m not kidding. It galvanized my class as readers. Even my reluctant readers were pulled in. For the low readers, I provided the audio files and advised them to follow along in the book with it and they were hooked.

This book made my students want to read!

I’ve found I have a lot to say about the writing process of The Outsiders, so I’m making a separate section for it here.

The Origin of Ponyboy's Name

That was Hinton on Twitter - she used to be on that thing 24/7 - even if she got tired of answering the same old questions!

But do you just stop there and say Hinton made up ‘Ponyboy’? Of course not. What inspired her?

A song. A song that many a daddy or grandpa bounced a little’un on their knee with and sang with them on the front porch.

The song is “My Ponyboy” and it goes back to 1909. Words by Bobby Heath, music by Charley O’Donnell. First sung by Lillian Lorraine in one of the Ziegfeld shows on Broadway. Ada Jones sang it on a 1909 phonograph recording, as well. Even Bruce Springsteen has adapted the song and included it on his 1992 album, Human Touch. The most popular recording is probably Jack Arthur’s 78rpm or 45rpm kiddie records from 1950 that was played over and over and over in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and undoubtedly on little Susie Hinton’s record player daily.

In The Outsiders, a reader doesn’t learn the name of our 1st-person narrator, Ponyboy, until page 6, when a character speaks to him. “You okay, Ponyboy?” Then our narrator has to explain his odd name.

Students agree that the name is unusual, even in a world where unusual names and spellings are much more common than in 1966. Ponyboy declares to us that his father named him, that he was a creative type, an original thinker. He tells us about his brother SodaPop. Of course, not everything is creative, as vanity allowed his father to name his firstborn Darryl Jr. Either Mom just went along with everything, or Dad was a force and the decider.

“Ponyboy” reflects SE Hinton’s love of horses, certainly. If you’ve studied her, you know she has a couple of short novels about horses she wrote as a younger teenager deep in her desk drawer, and that they will never see the light of day. Her characters all like horses, they play in the rodeos. Life in Oklahoma certainly includes horses.

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