Modeling Liberation: Audience, Ideology, and Critical Consciousness in S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders

Analyzing the narrative structure of S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders reveals a previously unexplored reason for its continuing popularity. Through layering three implied audiences—young people like the protagonist, an English teacher, and readers of a novel—Hinton constructs a "space" outside the conceptual boundaries of classist ideology. In this way, the novel goes beyond social commentary to model the development of critical consciousness in ways that embody Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, showing how classist ideology works to limit members of both higher and lower classes and inviting readers to participate in the protagonist's liberation.