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The Outsider
Year 10 2014
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-water
status 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, from
oneself, 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 its
most 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 from
relationships 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 childhood
and parents' sordid and abusive relationship. When he reaches Alaska he
finds he has been insufficiently prepared for the hardships to come.

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 Book
The Lost thing- Sean Tan
Wolves in the Sitee- Margaret Wild
Requiem for a beast- Matt Ottley
Home and Away- Marsden and Ottley


Plays
The death of a Salesman- Arthur Miller
Othello- Shakespeare
Radiance- Louis Nowra
Hedda Gabler -Henrik Ibsen


Graphic novel
Tyranny I keep you thin Lesley Fairfield

Short Animation- Vincent (Tim Burton)

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





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 Winterson
The 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 Twain
Huck 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 Vonnegut
Howard 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.






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.





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 as
dark 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 the
outsider 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.






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 Outsiders is 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 The
Outsiders. 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 Rye is 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 Rye is 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 must read The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Compare the novels, and see what all the hubbub is all about.


Visual Art

Edward Hopper
http://automathopper.blogspot.com.au


Poems
The 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
Acquainted with the Night
BY ROBERT 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 beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came 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 right
I have been one acquainted with the night.














Desert Places
BY ROBERT FROST
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In 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 loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

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






















Immigrants- Margaret Atwood
They are allowed to inherit
the sidewalks involved as palmlines, bricks
exhausted and soft, the deep
lawnsmells, orchards whorled
to the lands contours, the inflected weather

only to be told they are too poor
to keep it up, or someone
has noticed and wants to kill them; or the towns
pass laws which declare them obsolete.

I see them coming
up from the hold smelling of vomit,
infested, emaciated, their skins grey
with travel; as they step on shore

the old countries recede, become
perfect, thumbnail castles preserved
like gallstones in a glass bottle, the
towns dwindle upon the hillsides
in a light paperweight-clear.

They carry their carpetbags and trunks
with clothes, dishes, the family pictures;
they think they will make an order
like the old one, sow miniature orchards,
carve children and flocks out of wood

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

in time have crumbled, their tongues
stumble among awkward teeth, their ears
are filled with the sound of breaking glass.
I wish I could forget them
and so forget myself:

my mind is a wide pink map
across which move year after year
arrows and dotted lines, further and further,
people in railway cars

their heads stuck out of the windows
at stations, drinking milk or singing,
their features hidden with beards or shawls
day and night riding across an ocean of unknown
land to an unknown land.

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 pass
Where the boomerangs sleep with the spear --
With the nullah, the sling and the spear.

Uloola, behold him! The thunder that breaks
On 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 fought
With 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?











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.






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 grace
To 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 power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate.





















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.



Nor was I hungry; so I found

That hunger was a way

Of persons outside windows,

The entering takes away.