outsider related texts

5/20/2018 Outsider Related Texts

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The Outsider

Year 10 2014


2/16

WHY the outsider?

The outsider be he an immigrant from another country or a social

outcast like Huckleberry Finn is an endlessly fascinating creature:

he can be a benign commentator on his adoptive society, or a harsh

critic; he can be the underdog or the agitator; his fish-out-of-waterstatus can lend itself equally to comedy and tragedy. The entire

spectrum of human experience can be captured within his detached

or awed gaze. For both reader and writer, the outsider is an

instrument that allows us to see the world in an unfamiliar way, and

that for me is one of the prime aspirations of literature.

To be an outsider is to feel disconnected from life, from other people, fromoneself, the sight lines of communication always just slightly skewed.

Outsiders can be perceptive readers of inmost thoughts, but they slip off

surfaces and are awkward on firm ground. It is their unfortunate role to

stand against life. No outsider really wants to be one

The Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger-Novel

Surly, self-pitying and caustic, Holden Caulfield's is the voice of youth at itsmost alienated. The teenager is, after all, the perpetual and universal

outsider, both suspicious and envious of the adult world with all its arbitrary

constraints and heady opportunities, as expressed in Caulfield's hatred of

his buttoned-down schoolmates and his budding lust for jazz.

Into the Wild- Feature Film

A young man leaves his middle class existence in pursuit of freedom fromrelationships and obligation. Giving up his home, family, all possessions but

the few he carried on his back and donating all his savings to charity

Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) embarks on a journey throughout

America. His eventual aim is to travel into Alaska, into the wild, to spend

time with nature, with 'real' existence, away from the trappings of the

modern world. In the 20 months leading up to his Great Alaskan Adventure

his travels lead him on a path of self-discovery, to examine and appreciate

the world around him and to reflect on and heal from his troubled childhoodand parents' sordid and abusive relationship. When he reaches Alaska he

finds he has been insufficiently prepared for the hardships to come.
http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780241950432http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780241950432http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780241950432


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Suggested related texts for The Outsider

Film/TV Search IMDB

An angel at my table (1990)

As it is in Heaven (2004)

Boys dont cry (1999)Tim Burtons Vincent- You tube

Donnie Darko (2001)

Edward Scissor Hands (1990)

Elephant (2003)

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

Ghandi (1982)

Hotel Rwanda (2004)

Life is Beautiful (1997)

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

The Piano (1993)Schindlers List (1993)

Somersault (2004)

Milk

Somewhere

Big Fish

Shawshank Redemption

An Education (2009)

Submarine (2010)

American Beauty (1999)

Billy Eliot

Picture BookThe Lost thing- Sean Tan

Wolves in the Sitee- Margaret Wild

Requiem for a beast- Matt Ottley

Home and Away- Marsden and Ottley

PlaysThe death of a Salesman- Arthur Miller

Othello- ShakespeareRadiance- Louis Nowra

Hedda Gabler -Henrik Ibsen

Graphic novelTyranny I keep you thin Lesley Fairfield

Short Animation- Vincent (Tim Burton)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxQcBKUPm8o


4/16

NOVEL-Romulus my father- Raimond Gaita

Jasper Jones- Craig Silvey

Breath- Tim Winton

We need to talk about Kevin-Lionel Shriver

Never Let me Go- Kazuo Ishiguro

Oranges are not the only fruit- Janette WintersonThe Life of Pi- Yann Martel

Disgrace- J.M, Coetzee

The secret life of Bees- Sue Monk Kidd

Frankenstein-Mary Shelley

Huckleberry Finn-

Pigeon English Stephen Kelman

With Synopsis link to The Outsider

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark TwainHuck Finn is the epitome of social outcast as free spirit; an object of suspicion and

persecution to most, but of fascination to Tom, who sees in his self-preserving refusal

to conform a route to freedom from the oppressive manners of a God-fearing small

town. To be a successful outsider requires the kind of dogged individualism that Huck

has in spades, as beautifully illustrated in a scene towards the end of the book when he

laments all the habits and customs he might have to discard recreational cursing chief

among them if he is to join society under the protection of Widow Douglas.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

The classic political outcast, Winston Smith's plight is a thoroughly modern one. His

political beliefs are inextricably entwined with his sense of self, and his resistance to

Oceania's regime is emblematic of the individual's quest for personal freedom. That

freedom might come through the love of another person is perhaps a sentimental

notion; that things don't work out for the illicit lovers is telling of the dehumanising

nature of the society Orwell envisions.

Mother Night by Kurt VonnegutHoward W Campbell Jr, the spy, Nazi propagandist and war criminal/patriot in

Vonnegut's coal-black comedy, is an uber-outsider, a gleefully amoral creation who

represents every perceived threat to civilised postwar society in one ramshackle

package. That he can observe his crazy world with a poet's compassion, and cling to

high ideals of romantic love, only makes his detachment from the horrors of war all the

more shocking.
http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780141321103http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780141036144http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780099819301http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780099819301http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780141036144http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780141321103


5/16

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The outsider as sagacious misfit, ridiculous pundit on the society he rejects and which

rejects him, inflated monster of misdirected fury. Ignatius J Reilly still lives with his

mother. He has questionable dress sense and a lackadaisical approach to personal

hygiene. And the outsider's unwavering certainty that he is right and it's the rest of the

world that needs to catch up to him. Hilarious and wretched, Ignatius is a skewed eye

on a society that produces people like him with alarming frequency.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

In this modern Gothic horror, Frank Cauldhame is the teenager warped by his own

history and isolation into a creature of casual malevolence. His ritualised acts of

violence articulate the alienation felt when one is cast adrift geographically (his is a

remote, solitary existence, away from other people and the community they provide)

and spiritually (a childhood trauma having separated him from his own soul). Chilling.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Balram Halwai, the narrator of this spry jaunt through modern India, is an economic

migrant lured to the big city in search of the wealth his country's embrace of capitalism

has promised him. He finds that the material world is a corrupting place. A look at how

aspirations, even at their most prosaic, can untether us from our moral selves, and how

the globalised world has made us all outsiders in one form or another.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

The outsider as agent of change, the benevolent Mr Watts brings hope to an adopted

community besieged by civil war. With modest dignity he ignites the minds of the

children in his care, providing through education and the pleasure of reading a sorely

needed respite from the horrors that are threatening to engulf them. It is only with an

outsider's knowledge of a wider world that he is able to instil in his charges a sense of

possibility beyond the confines of their beleaguered home.

Red Dog, Red Dog by Patrick Lane

The Stark family, protagonists of this novel of bleak, frustrated lives in redneck British

Columbia, are doomed to outsider status by their poverty and the harshness of their

environment. With limited opportunity for transcending their place in the world, only

the temporary compensations of alcohol and violence or the febrile dreams of escape

distinguish them from the landscape in which they are trapped. The tension between

the outsider's inner life and the unyielding certainty of his reality has rarely been so

incisively documented.
http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780141182865http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780349101774http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781843547228http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780719569944http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780434019984http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780434019984http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780719569944http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781843547228http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780349101774http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780141182865


6/16

Even The Dogs by Jon McGregor

The characters in McGregor's brilliant, excoriating novel inhabit the underbelly of

modern urban Britain; they're the alcoholics and addicts, the homeless and the

dispossessed, those who have discarded or been discarded by a society that has failed

them. That he manages to instil their lives with flashes of spiteful dignity and tentative

hope speaks volumes for his humanity, and and makes this a devastating and

exhilarating portrayal of life outside the mainstream.

Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky

The first modern novel features the first modern outsider. A monologue of sarcastic

rage from a man who has chosen isolation because he knows he doesn't fit in. Irascible,

clever, proud, the Underground Man harangues the ordinary world for its naivety,

optimism, self-regard; he knows - feels - that man's freedom is in the choice to decide

against himself, to spurn benefit and reward, to turn himself inside out and display the

fear, misery, meanness of his desperate self. The Underground Man is the outsider asdark mirror. The final pages are some of Dostoyevsky's best, and they are some of his

grimmest. Grim Dostoyevsky: it doesn't get better than that.

Beethoven by Maynard Solomon

Always wanted the "van" to be "von", as though that would have made any difference.

Even before he went deaf, Beethoven was a difficult, irritable, haughty personality,

comporting himself with tramp-like negligence. Too brilliant for his own class, too

eccentric for high society, Beethoven is the prime example of artist as outsider. But

more profoundly, one could almost regard the deaf Beethoven as a metaphor for theoutsider generally: his last music, composed when he was completely deaf, transcends

the personal to become a universal statement for man's inmost dignity - a musical

ethics. Yet as a man, as a musician, it was experienced as silence - as if he was standing

behind glass looking in at an absurd performance of thrashing of arms, puffed-out

cheeks, fluttering fingers. This is the world to the outsider and Beethoven is our tragic

example.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Two outsiders for the price of one. Early on Jane doesn't fit. Although plain, she

somehow brings attention to herself (a classic aspect of the outsider) and is

capriciously bullied and punished. Later she finds comfort in the isolation of Thornfield,

her teaching duties. It is here she meets Rochester, a precursor to the modern outsider:

a man of dark moods, irritable and discontented, a world roamer. As we all know, it

ends happily, making Jane Eyre the story of outsiders redeemed by love. So maybe

there is hope, after all.
http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781408809471http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781408809471


7/16

HOW TO MAKE A LINK TO CATCHER IN THE RYE

The Outsiders

Yes, this is another book about teenagers. The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton, has long been a high school

favorite, but the book has also been compared to The Catcher in the Rye. The Outsidersis about a close-

knit group of teenagers. But, the novel is also about the individual-versus-society. How must they

interact? Holden tells the story in The Catcher in the Rye, and Ponyboy tells the narrative of TheOutsiders. How does the process of telling the story allow these boys to make a connection? Read this

novel, and see how it compares to The Catcher in the Rye.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The Catcher in the Ryeis a coming-of-age story--told by Holden Caulfield, with a sense of bitterness

and cynicism.One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,by Ken Kesey, is a protest novel--told from Chief

Bromden's point of view. Holden tells his story from behind the walls of an institution, while Bromden

tells his story after he has escaped from the hospital. What can we learn about the individual versus

society from studying these two books?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Catcher in the Ryeis often compared to Mark Twain's classic,>The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn.Both books involve the coming-of-age process of the main protagonist; both novels follow the

journey of the boys; and both works have caused violent reactions in their readers. You mustread The

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Compare the novels, and see what all the hubbub is all about.

Visual Art

Edward Hopperhttp://automathopper.blogspot.com.au

PoemsThe Poems of William Blake

Blake enjoyed sitting naked with his wife in their back garden imagining they were in

Eden, quite a radical attitude at the height of the Enlightenment and the birth of the

industrial revolution. Blake rejected rationalism, the mechanistic, the scientific and

instead advocated experiences unfashionable in his era, the mystic, mythological,

spiritual, non-rational. Isolated and ridiculed because he foresaw and forswore the

future of the new world, Blake is the outsider as visionary.

Howl- Allen Ginsberg.

The Million Mile March-MAYA ANGELOU

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock- T.S.Eliot

Paralytic- Sylvia Plath
http://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6ahttp://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6ahttp://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6chttp://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6chttp://classiclit.about.com/od/oneflewoverthecuckoos/fr/aa_oneflew.htmhttp://classiclit.about.com/od/oneflewoverthecuckoos/fr/aa_oneflew.htmhttp://classiclit.about.com/od/oneflewoverthecuckoos/fr/aa_oneflew.htmhttp://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6%5bhttp://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6%5bhttp://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/fr/aa_huckfinn.htmhttp://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/fr/aa_huckfinn.htmhttp://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/fr/aa_huckfinn.htmhttp://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/fr/aa_huckfinn.htmhttp://automathopper.blogspot.com.au/http://automathopper.blogspot.com.au/http://automathopper.blogspot.com.au/http://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/fr/aa_huckfinn.htmhttp://classiclit.about.com/od/adventuresofhuckleberry/fr/aa_huckfinn.htmhttp://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6%5bhttp://classiclit.about.com/od/oneflewoverthecuckoos/fr/aa_oneflew.htmhttp://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6chttp://erclk.about.com/?zi=12/x6a


8/16

Acquainted with the NightBYROBERT FROST

I have been one acquainted with the night.I have walked out in rainand back in rain.I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.I have passed by the watchman on his beatAnd dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feetWhen far away an interrupted cryCame over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;And further still at an unearthly height,One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor rightI have been one acquainted with the night.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frosthttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frosthttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frosthttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frost


9/16

Desert Places

BY ROBERT FROSTSnow falling and night falling fast, oh, fastIn a field I looked into going past,And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have itit is theirs.All animals are smothered in their lairs.I am too absent-spirited to count;The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that lonelinessWill be more lonely ere it will be lessA blanker whiteness of benighted snowWith no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween starson stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.


10/16

Immigrants- Margaret AtwoodThey are allowed to inheritthe sidewalks involved as palmlines, bricksexhausted and soft, the deeplawnsmells, orchards whorledto the lands contours, the inflected weather

only to be told they are too poorto keep it up, or someonehas noticed and wants to kill them; or the townspass laws which declare them obsolete.

I see them comingup from the hold smelling of vomit,infested, emaciated, their skins grey

with travel; as they step on shore

the old countries recede, becomeperfect, thumbnail castles preservedlike gallstones in a glass bottle, thetowns dwindle upon the hillsidesin a light paperweight-clear.

They carry their carpetbags and trunkswith clothes, dishes, the family pictures;they think they will make an orderlike the old one, sow miniature orchards,

carve children and flocks out of wood

but always they are too poor, the skyis flat, the green fruit shrivelsin the prairie sun, wood is for burning;and if they go back, the towns

in time have crumbled, their tonguesstumble among awkward teeth, their earsare filled with the sound of breaking glass.

I wish I could forget themand so forget myself:

my mind is a wide pink mapacross which move year after yeararrows and dotted lines, further and further,people in railway cars

their heads stuck out of the windowsat stations, drinking milk or singing,

their features hidden with beards or shawlsday and night riding across an ocean of unknownland to an unknown land.


11/16

THE LAST OF HIS TRIBE

By Henry Kendall

He crouches, and buries his face on his knees,And hides in the dark of his hair;

For he cannot look up to the storm-smitten trees,Or think of the loneliness there --Of the loss and the loneliness there.

The wallaroos grope through the tufts of the grass,And turn to their coverts for fear;

But he sits in the ashes and lets them passWhere the boomerangs sleep with the spear --With the nullah, the sling and the spear.

Uloola, behold him! The thunder that breaksOn the tops of the rocks with the rain,

And the wind which drives up with the salt of the lakes,Have made him a hunter again --

A hunter and fisher again.

For his eyes have been full with a smouldering thought;But he dreams of the hunts of yore,

And of foes that he sought, and of fights that he foughtWith those who will battle no more --

Who will go to the battle no more.

It is well that the water which tumbles and fills,Goes moaning and moaning along;

For an echo rolls out from the sides of the hills,And he starts at a wonderful song --At the sound of a wonderful song.

And he sees, through the rents of the scattering fogs,The corroboree warlike and grim,

And the lubra who sat by the fire on the logs,To watch, like a mourner, for him --Like a mother and mourner for him.

Will he go in his sleep from these desolate lands,Like a chief, to the rest of his race,

With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands,And gleams like a dream in his face --Like a marvellous dream in his face?


12/16

Outcast

BY Claude McKay

For the dim regions whence my fathers came

My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.

Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;

My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.

I would go back to darkness and to peace,

But the great western world holds me in fee,

And I may never hope for full release

While to its alien gods I bend my knee.

Something in me is lost, forever lost,

Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,

And I must walk the way of life a ghost

Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;

For I was born, far from my native clime,

Under the white man's menace, out of time.


13/16

The White House

Claude McKay

Your door is shut against my tightened face,And I am sharp as steel with discontent;But I possess the courage and the graceTo bear my anger proudly and unbent.The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,A chafing savage, down the decent street;

And passion rends my vitals as I pass,Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,And find in it the superhuman powerTo hold me to the letter of your law!Oh, I must keep my heart inviolateAgainst the potent poison of your hate.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/25http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/25http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/25


14/16

Emily Dickinson

I had been hungry all the years-

My noon had come, to dine-

I, trembling, drew the table near

And touched the curious wine.

'T was this on tables I had seen

When turning, hungry, lone,

I looked in windows, for the wealth

I could not hope to own.

I did not know the ample bread,

'T was so unlike the crumb

The birds and I had often shared

In Nature's dining-room.

The plenty hurt me, 't was so new,--

Myself felt ill and odd,

As berry of a mountain bush

Transplanted to the road.


15/16

Nor was I hungry; so I found

That hunger was a way

Of persons outside windows,

The entering takes away.


16/16

outsider related texts

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