Can someone please help
Symbolizing unity between stereotypical social classes
Are judgments and stereotypes driving communities apart? Are these judgments necessarily correct? The fictional story The outsiders by S.E Hinton is about greasers trying to live with the socs constantly jumping them. Greasers are a group of poor hoodlums whose name originate from their long greasy hair, while the Socs are a group of very rich and elite people.
Yet, when race and socio-economic class are both determined, there is reason to expect that stereotypes result. As a matter of fact, stereotypes associated with high and poor class differ more as the function of socio-economic class. When socio-economic class is defined, stereotypes are typically associated with the rich as smart, aggressive, and hardworking. Also, stereotypes traditionally related to the poor are slow, unpredictable, and uneducated.
In today’s world, stereotyping is the natural reaction when people see people of a social class. Most of the time however, these are far from the truth and should not be used to predetermine something about a different person. In The Outsiders, a story by S.E. Hinton, which is about a greaser fitting in, these stereotypes are as far from the truth as possible. In the book, the Greasers, a poor group who wear too much grease in their hair, struggle because they get beat up by the Socs whenever they see them. The Socs are the rich, who want nothing but to cause trouble for the Greasers. The author uses symbolism, foreshadowing, and idioms in her story to show to the reader that incorrectly using social stereotypes can lead to bad assumptions about a person, when most people have more in common than they might think.
To conclude, S.E Hinton creatively uses symbolism and foreshadowing to help the reader see that stereotypical relations cause communities to be driven apart, when they do not have the same values or beliefs. The use of symbolism in this story is very effective because it shows how different people can be and how similar people can be.