What does the story Gone with the Wind symbolize in The Outsiders?

Gone with the Wind is an American novel written by Margaret Mitchell in 1936. In The Outsiders, it symbolizes the closeness between Ponyboy and his friend Johnny. When the boys are first hiding out in the church, Johnny does some shopping and picks up a paperback copy of Gone with the Wind. He says he remembers Ponyboy saying he always wanted to read it. This shows that Johnny listens to Ponyboy and remembers details about what he likes, wants, and dreams of. This is a sign of true friendship.

Ponyboy reads the novel aloud while they are hiding out in the church, and the boys discuss the themes and characters. One theme of Gone with the Wind is the American civil war. The characters in The Outsiders are engaged in a war, too. The two gangs, the greasers and the socs, fight for control of the city. The two sides in the American civil war in Gone with the Wind symbolize the two sides in the rumble in The Outsiders.

The male characters in Gone with the Wind are gentlemen and heroes, and Ponyboy and Johnny become heroes when they save the children from the burning church. Their discussion of behaving like a southern gentleman from Gone with the Wind might make them feel more heroic during and after their deed. Although Ponyboy and Johnny are young teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks, with nothing but their hair to distinguish them, the southern gentlemen described in Gone with the Wind symbolize Ponyboy and Johnny because they share the same heroic hearts.

When Johnny dies, he leaves the unfinished novel Gone with the Wind for Ponyboy. Ponyboy doesn't finish reading the novel without Johnny. For him, the novel symbolizes his friendship with Johnny and the close time they spent together. To finish reading it after Johnny's death would be like a betrayal. The unfinished novel symbolizes Johnny's unfinished life. 

Reading Gone with the Wind also symbolizes Ponyboy's intelligence. Near the end of the novel, his brother Darry finally admits that he is proud of Ponyboy when he tells him to stay in school and get a scholarship to college. This is important to Ponyboy as he has always felt that Darry didn't care for him. 

Find out more about The Outsiders . 

Toward the end of Section 4, the story's theme is revealed. What is that theme?

One of the story's themes, revealed at the end of the fourth section, is that farm living provides a kind of peace, happiness, and freedom that city living never can.

Consider Rosicky's thoughts as he walks home, worrying about whether Polly and Rudy will give up farm life and move to a city, where they would live in crowded, squalid conditions and never be free. To Rosicky, working in a city means chaining yourself to...

One of the story's themes, revealed at the end of the fourth section, is that farm living provides a kind of peace, happiness, and freedom that city living never can.

Consider Rosicky's thoughts as he walks home, worrying about whether Polly and Rudy will give up farm life and move to a city, where they would live in crowded, squalid conditions and never be free. To Rosicky, working in a city means chaining yourself to your employer, but working on a farm means devoting yourself to the land, and the land in all its abundance provides for you in return, keeping you free. "To be a landless man was to be a wage-earner, a slave, all your life; to have nothing, to be nothing," Rosicky thinks. "Landless" is tantamount to "hopeless" and "joyless" for this character. Here are his final thoughts in that section as he approaches his own home:

That kitchen with the shining windows was dear to him; but the sleeping fields and bright stars and the noble darkness were dearer still.

That is, he loves his house and the brightness within it (his family and the love they share) but he also loves the land, the stars, and even the darkness. These last three things can't be found if you live in a city. For Rosicky, life in the country is clean, full of fresh air and "bright stars," while life in a city would be noisy and dirty, full of families squabbling and men essentially tied to the machines they work on indoors.

In Ralph Ellison's Battle Royal, what is the significance of the electrified rug covered with bills and coins? How does this scene show the power...

Ralph Ellison's short story Battle Royal is a serious indictment of those who sought to play 'the white man's game' in the misguided belief that such conduct would somehow ingratiate oneself into the white man's good graces. Ellison's story is all about the degradations to which blacks were routinely subjected at the hands of whites, and about that misguided belief against which the story's narrator's father had been warned by his dying grandfather. On his deathbed, the grandfather had warned the narrator's father:

"Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth."

What the grandfather was saying was that any attempt at placating whites through attempts at assimilation into white culture would not only fail, but would further degrade the spirit of the blacks who feigned such desires. A more confrontational style that may lack indications of good breeding yet which preserved black pride was the more rational course to pursue.

The narrator of Ellison's story has not abided his grandfather's warning; on the contrary, he has pursued the road of least resistance in the hopes of being accepted by whites, even at the expense of faith and pride in his own ethnicity. The narrator, however, is not unaware of the paradoxical nature of his character. As the following passage reveals, he is fully cognizant of the questionable nature of the path he has heretofore followed:

"I was praised by the most lily-white men in town. I was considered an example of desirable conduct-just as my grandfather had been. And what puzzled me was that the old man had defined it as treachery. When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did. It made me afraid that some day they would look upon me as a traitor and I would be lost. Still I was more afraid to act any other way because they didn't like that at all."

This lengthy passage from Battle Royal illuminates the moral and emotional quandary in which many blacks found themselves. Those who tried to assimilate were doomed to fail. The white establishment would not have it any other way. The battle that awaits, however, the "Battle Royal," will expose the nature of the whites who assume an intellectual, physical and moral superiority over blacks that is belied by their actual conduct. And, the narrator plays right into the whites' collective hands, presuming to his own level of superiority over other, less educated and erudite blacks. As he relates in the build-up to the start of the battle, a battle that will precede the narrator's address before the assembled elites of white society:

"I had some misgivings over the battle royal, by the way. Not from a distaste for fighting but because I didn't care too much for the other fellows who were to take part. . .No one could mistake their toughness. And besides, I suspected that fighting a battle royal might detract from the dignity of my speech. In those pre-invisible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington. But the other fellows didn't care too much for me either, and there were nine of them. I felt superior to them in my way."

Against this concentration of poor, uneducated blacks is arrayed the cream of white society. "They were all there-bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants," the narrator notes, while further describing these white elites as drunken buffoons compelled to denigrate these black men for their own amusement. It is the blindfolds placed on the heads of the blacks, however, that proves something of an equalizer. The blindfolds eliminate the distinctions between the narrator and the other blacks. As he describes the sensation of being deprived of his sight, "now I felt a sudden fit of blind terror. I was unused to darkness, it was as though I had suddenly found myself in a dark room filled with poisonous cottonmouths."

It is during the scene in which the blacks are humiliated by being presented with the appearance of a beautiful, blonde-haired white woman writhing naked before them--an exercise in the most basest of human degradation--that the narrator witnesses most sharply the depths to which blacks have descended in this post-abolition society. The sight of one of the scantily-clad black men trying futilely to conceal his natural and anticipated response to the woman's appearance is designed to further illuminate the irony in the white elite's sense of values and ideas of entertainment.

And then comes the Battle Royal, the denigrating, brutal subjugation of blacks at each other's hand for the entertainment of those who assume themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to their "entertainers." After the narrator is beaten by Tatlock, the rug is rolled out, on which, the blacks are led to believe, are coins and other forms of wealth. Note the narrator's description of the scene:

What will happen when a magnet is placed near a pile of steel paper clips?

Magnets generate magnetic field and are able to influence magnetic materials. It pulls on magnetic materials and may repel or attract another magnet (depending upon which poles are brought closer to each other). Steel paper clips are made of magnetic material and are small enough to be picked up by a magnet. So when we bring a magnet closer to a pile of steel paper clips, these clips will be attracted to the magnet and...

Magnets generate magnetic field and are able to influence magnetic materials. It pulls on magnetic materials and may repel or attract another magnet (depending upon which poles are brought closer to each other). Steel paper clips are made of magnetic material and are small enough to be picked up by a magnet. So when we bring a magnet closer to a pile of steel paper clips, these clips will be attracted to the magnet and a number of such clips will attach to it. The bigger the magnet, the higher is the number of paper clips that will attach to it. In fact, one can also make a chain of steel paper clips by attaching one clip at a time to an already attached clip. The chain can be made very long, depending on the size of the magnet (bigger the magnet, longer the chain).

Hope this helps.  

How does Maudie's house fire symbolize the closeness and courage of the community in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird?

In Chapter 8, Atticus wakes up Jem and Scout in the middle of the night because Miss Maudie's house is on fire. Jem and Scout stand in the Radley yard and watch as their neighbors attempt to save Maudie's furniture from the flames. Scout watches as Mr. Avery gets stuck in the window as he is attempting to escape Maudie's house. Mr. Avery barely makes it out alive before the house collapses. Harper Lee uses...

In Chapter 8, Atticus wakes up Jem and Scout in the middle of the night because Miss Maudie's house is on fire. Jem and Scout stand in the Radley yard and watch as their neighbors attempt to save Maudie's furniture from the flames. Scout watches as Mr. Avery gets stuck in the window as he is attempting to escape Maudie's house. Mr. Avery barely makes it out alive before the house collapses. Harper Lee uses Maudie's house fire to symbolize the unity of the community throughout the novel. Maudie's neighbors fearlessly risk their lives to rescue her possessions from the flames. Scout and Jem watch their neighbors display courage by entering the burning house. They work in unison by carrying her furniture and other possessions out of the house, while they attempt to quell the flames. Despite the togetherness and courage displayed by Maycomb's community members, they hold prejudiced views towards African Americans. Later on in the novel, Jem and Scout learn an important lesson in the duality of human nature. They learn that their compassionate neighbors are also racist, and treat African Americans with contempt every day.

What characterized the Arab mujahedeen movement after the Soviets began their withdrawal?

The term "Mujahideen" historically has referred to any persons or groups of people who are engaged in jihad. Jihad refers to any action which promotes the Islamic faith, but has often been interpreted or exploited to justify warfare, as in the Islamic conquests of the seventh through ninth centuries, or the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East today. When we use the term today, we are most often referring to Islamic groups engaged in some...

The term "Mujahideen" historically has referred to any persons or groups of people who are engaged in jihad. Jihad refers to any action which promotes the Islamic faith, but has often been interpreted or exploited to justify warfare, as in the Islamic conquests of the seventh through ninth centuries, or the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East today. When we use the term today, we are most often referring to Islamic groups engaged in some kind of warfare.

In the context of the Cold War, the mujahideen refers to a number of Afghan groups who united, though loosely, in rebellion against the Afghan government. The government supported the Soviet Union and Soviet troops were brought into the country to try and maintain control. The mujahideen and Soviet armies fought with escalating scale and impact of violence, until the withdrawal of the Soviet troops in 1989.

After the Soviet withdrawal, the loosely united mujahideen forces broke up into groups which fought each other for control of territories. One of the groups organized in the wake of this split was the Taliban- an armed movement of mostly refugee individuals who followed a highly fundamentalist form of Islam. The leader of this movement, Mohammed Omar, used the dissatisfaction of the Afghan people with the inconsistent and corrupt mujahideen rule as a unifying force. 

The mujahideen, post-Soviet withdrawal, is characterized by fragmentation, a high degree of armed conflict, and the establishment of new extremist-fundamentalist groups. The effects of this fragmentation and re-unification of identity can still be felt today throughout the Middle East.

How do the prejudices of the town influence the behavior of the people who live there?

Maycomb is a peaceful town to live in as long as everyone stays in his or her assigned social, political, financial, and racial class. If anyone steps out of any of these boundaries, then watch the prejudices fly! No one wants to be singled out, either, because if a person isn't going along with the crowd, then he or she is bound to hear it from the local gossip, the crazy old woman, the local...

Maycomb is a peaceful town to live in as long as everyone stays in his or her assigned social, political, financial, and racial class. If anyone steps out of any of these boundaries, then watch the prejudices fly! No one wants to be singled out, either, because if a person isn't going along with the crowd, then he or she is bound to hear it from the local gossip, the crazy old woman, the local newspaper or their next-door neighbor.

In an effort to fend off the town's prejudices, many people are influenced to behave differently. First of all, Dolphus Raymond is one man who is influenced to behave like a drunk in order to fend off criticism about his interracial relationships and children. He walks around town with Coca Cola wrapped in a brown paper bag in an effort to give people a reason to understand and accept his behavior. He explains it as follows:

"I try to give 'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason. When I come to town, which is seldom. . . folks can say Dolphus Raymond's in the clutches of whiskey—that's why he won't change his ways. He can't help himself, that's why he lives the way he does" (200).

When Mr. Raymond tells this to Scout, she points out that it isn't honest. He responds by saying that it "helps folks," but it helps him to avoid them and their prejudiced ways as well. In addition, it helps him to maintain a certain status quo that everyone can handle.

The prejudices of the town influence the children, too. For instance, Cecil Jacobs tells everyone at school "Scout Finch's daddy defended ni**ers" (74), and Cousin Francis tells Scout that her father is "nothin' but a ni**er-lover" (83). These children would not be saying these things if they, first, didn't hear them at home; second, if they really knew what those words meant; and third, if they knew how hurtful those words were. But the community and their parents teach them these words and that the hatred associated with them is acceptable, which only perpetuates the prejudices and the disrespectful behavior.

Finally, the greatest influence of the town's prejudiced state of mind is demonstrated by the conviction of an innocent black man for the alleged rape of a young white woman. The jury of twelve white men could not get past their old, time-honored prejudices to free an innocent man. They allowed the prejudices of the town to cast their votes against Tom Robinson, not their reason or understanding of the facts of the case. The message that is sent to everyone, black or white, is that they will maintain control of these prejudices even if it means accepting and sustaining lies to do it.