I would say that the most important life lesson that
Ponyboy learns has to be in the last couple of pages of the story, when he reads the
final letter that Johnny wrote to him that includes Johnny's analysis of the poem by
Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay." In this letter, Johnny encourages Ponyboy to not
be limited by the identity that others give him and he reminds him that there is still
"lots of good in the world." This leads Ponyboy to contemplate the situation that is his
reality, with hundreds of boys and girls divided and identified based on their wealth or
lack of it and where they live in town. Note what he says about this
situation:
Suddenly it wasn't only a personal thing to me.
I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys
with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched
sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down
under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too
late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you
did.
Ponyboy concludes that
these boys need some help to tell their side of the story so that these boys would not
be judged so quickly and to give them hope. Ponyboy realises that it is possible to defy
the identifications that are given in this novel and which are shown to be so harmful:
greaser or soc, and that these labels can be transcended.
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