A Common Thread....

While I have read each book for this course one thing in particular keeps standing out to me. Maybe it is because it is so true in our daily lives and cultures that it is such a constant theme in literature. The idea that keeps presenting itself to me is this-if someone is different, an individual does not act, dress, or think the way the rest of society, the collective does, they are either cast out, frowned upon or locked up, or...some combination of those three. The collective seemingly cannot comprehend the individual. In the Overcoat, Akaky is viewed as an outcast because he is perfectly content to do his work, not advance, and live a mundane repetitive life. Michael Kohlhaas takes it upon himself to find justice in his story by Kleist. Nora, in A Doll's House makes her husband furious and risks punishment by society by stepping outside the accepted norms for women and what is considered to be womanly behavior. Kafka's ill fated protagonist is shunned and attacked even by his own family, when Gregor becomes a cockroach. He is seen as a disgusting monster, they cannot see the fact that he is inside still human because he is so very different from them. In The Stranger Mersault is locked up not because he killed the Arab but because he was an emotionless and odd individual. And the Arabs in the same book are viewed as less than human or less than the French colonists because they are different-they look different, they have different beliefs, different customs. In Things Fall Apart, and indeed with colonialism in general, missionaries come in claiming to know the path to salvation and writing off centuries old traditions because they are unfamiliar to them. Even as I write this, the adjectives I use to convey the way that these "outcasts" are viewed, come to me because society teaches the lessons of these works of literature. What if they author's themselves are simply outcasts trying to point out the wrongs that society commits every day? What if they are simply looking for someone to understand them, through their main characters, because they have been misunderstood their whole lives?