The pain is equal

In  The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton , the Greasers try to survive without getting beaten by the brutal Socs; the Socs (also known as the Socials) are a gang from the west side who are very wealthy and start fights and beat up Greasers for fun. The story is wrote in the Greasers point of view. From this point of view, a lot of events and people are described in a way that creates pain or hurt in the reader about the Greasers who are abused by the Socs.

One way that the Greasers point of view influences the reader's interpretation is how their view shows that the Greasers just mind their own business all the time and that the awful Socs come and try to beat them for no reason. When a reader reads this story they feel for the Greasers getting beat up, but what the reader may not understand is the Socs background story. As the reader I feel like if I knew the Socs story I would understand way they do the things that they do, but as a reader I don’t know that so I just have to go from what the book says.

However, the reader would see and feel changes of the Greasers if the novel was written in the view of the Socs. For example, the reader wouldn't think the Socs were so brutal if he or she knew the Socs have a rough time going through life, or if you knew that the Socs would get it from their parents.

As you can see, the point of view of this story forces the reader to only one side of the story. In The Outsiders, the narrator’s perspective makes the reader think negative about the Socs and makes the reader feel like the Socs are bad people and the Greasers are helpless and innocent even though that's not always true. Understanding the narrator’s point is so important because if you don’t go by where the view of the writer is coming from, then the ending of the book will not make any sense because you think differently about the characters in the book; even if you don’t know the point of view of the other people you’re just going to have to trust the reader and believe what they say.