Character Sketch

Ponyboy Curtis

Ponyboy Curtis is a 14 year old boy who lives in a town/city Oklahoma where there are the richer Soc’s gang and the Greasers who are not as fortunate, Ponyboy is a greaser. Ponyboy has light-brown, almost red hair and greenish-grey eyes, and he’s small for 14 but has a good build. Ponyboy has longer hair than most boys squared off in the back and long at the front and on the sides. He is very strong in school as he has skipped a grade and still almost achieves straight A’s. He has a high IQ but does not have a high street-smart IQ as demonstrated in the beginning of the story. Ponyboy has a passion for reading and for movies an example of this is when Ponyboy and Johnnycake are reading Gone with the Wind and another example is at the beginning of the book when Ponyboy leaves a Paul Newman movie. Ponyboy has a dislike for boys with green eyes, the Soc’s and not so much but he doesn’t like as well Dallas Winston and Steve Randall. Ponyboy has feelings for everyone as he cares about everyone in the gang as they are a tight knit community. Sodapop and Darry both have more respect and love given to them by Ponyboy because they are brothers but Ponyboy runs away when Darry hits him later on in the story. Ponyboy feels Dallas is always up to no good thus disliking him but this isn’t the case later on throughout the story when Ponyboy learns more about Dallas these things change when Dallas assists them by telling the fuzz that Ponyboy and Johnny are in Texas and then locates them and then helps them by doing things such as buying them food helping them getaway. Johnnycake spends the most time with Ponyboy over the course of the novel Ponyboy feels that Johnnycake is like a brother and acts normally around him; he also doesn’t think Johnnycake was stupid he just liked to explore certain things a little more. Johnny has to have liked Ponyboy a lot to have killed a soc to save his life, Johnny has done lots of nice things for Ponyboy like doing the shopping and cutting and bleaching his hair even though it looked tuff. Ponyboy’s personality doesn’t change except for his now belief that some Soc’s weren’t evil an example was their undercover spy Cherry. I think Ponyboy is an interesting character and that he has many qualities that could allow him to fit into any social groups (by social groups I don’t mean Soc’s).