Violence and Revenge Theme Analysis

Violence permeates Bryon and Mark’s gang-filled town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the boys take part in it themselves. They see violence as a source of entertainment, a way to maintain a tough reputation, and the best way to get revenge on people who have wronged them. However, the excitement of fighting wears off for Bryon over the course of the book, particularly because he realizes that “getting even” traps people in an unending cycle of violence. By the end of the book, Bryon decides that exacting revenge or seeming tough is no longer worth the damage that violence inflicts on himself and others. While violence may seem like an effective way to boost one’s reputation or exact revenge, it causes far more problems than it solves. Violence, Hinton ultimately suggests, only breeds more violence.

At the beginning of the book, Bryon and Mark view violence as a source of entertainment and a means of upholding their hardened reputations in the community. The gang violence that saturates Tulsa is real and terrifying, but when Bryon and Mark are children, they emulate it as an entertaining game. When Bryon and Mark get older and begin to take part in violence themselves, they continue to see it as a sport or a game. Bryon describes how, when they were old enough to participate in real gang violence, they “fought with chains and [they] fought barefisted and [they] fought Socs and [they] fought other grease gangs.” Even as a young adult, Bryon sees violence as fun and exciting—he considers it a natural extension of their childhood play. Bryon also explains that he and Mark fight in order to maintain their rough reputations. He relays that once, they beat up a group of hippies even though the hippies didn’t fight back, simply to keep up their image as “tough guys.” Likewise, whenever Bryon (as the narrator) introduces a male character, he often mentions whether they have a reputation for being tough—which is predicated on the violence they’ve committed in the past.

Ultimately, though, violence only breeds more violence, which is especially true where retaliation is involved—committing violence against someone spurs them to get even, which stirs up a seemingly endless back-and-forth of more violence. When Bryon and Mark visit Bryon’s mother in the hospital after she has an operation, they meet another patient named Mike, who has bandages around his head, both arms in slings, and stitches in his lip. He explains that he drove a black girl named Connie home after stopping a group of his friends from harassing her. Even though Connie thanked him for saving her, when Mike dropped her off at her house, black men surrounded his car, and she told them to kill him—which is how he ended up in the hospital with such bad injuries. Mike affirms, however, that he doesn’t hate them for what they did, recognizing that Connie was probably fed up with being bullied by white people, and that they were getting revenge for previous injustices that Connie had faced. Mike’s story thus illustrates the destructive cycle of revenge, and how it can harm even those on the outside of the cycle who try to put a stop to it. Bryon comes to the same realization later: at a dance, Bryon’s ex-girlfriend, Angela Shepard, gets a guy to attack Mark’s friend Ponyboy Curtis, whom Angela believed was ignoring her advances. When Mark steps in, the guy hits him with a bottle, necessitating 10 stitches in Mark’s head. Later, Mark finds Angela when she’s drunk, plies her with even more alcohol, and cuts off her long hair while she’s passed out. Angela’s brothers then beat up Bryon for what Mark did—and he, too, has to get stitches and his ribs taped. Mark was trying to “get even” with Angela, but this only led the Shepards to “get even” in return, reinforcing how violence only creates more violence.

Sick of the never-ending cycle of this “getting-even jazz,” Bryon asks Mark not to fight the Shepards. Mark is shocked, because he is of the eye-for-an-eye mindset that violence must be met with violence. Bryon explains, “I'm sick of this circle of beating up people and getting beat up.” Like Mike, Bryon recognizes the harm of their cycle and wants to break it. But while both Mike and Bryon try to stop the cycle of violence that they’re trapped in, an attitude of nonviolence isn’t necessarily guaranteed to stop violence altogether—after all, Mike’s nonviolent stance in protecting Connie from his friends is what put him in the hospital. Nonetheless, the book implies that this intention is the right one. Nonviolence might not always be powerful enough to stop the cycle, but the alternative—violence—only perpetuates the cycle.