Do Misfits Have More Insight on the Human Condition?

"I think anybody who has become an artist has learned to claim being a misfit as something that’s cool. Standing outside of the frame is part of what enables us to have insight," said Emily Raboteau, author of "The Professor's Daughter," a novel about a young woman trying to come to terms with a mixed-race background very similar to her own.

She was taking part in a roundtable discussion on what is sometimes called confessional writing published by Literary Hub.





Raboteau's assertion was interesting to me because man is essentially a tribal animal and those who don't fit easily, or comfortably, into one tribe or another are often the subject of fiction, in part because they are viewed as having greater insight into the world around them than individuals who live comfortably within their tribal conventions.

The most famous misfit of all?  Perhaps Leopold Bloom of "Ulysses" fame. But I'm not really thinking of him at the moment.  While there are many, many examples of literary misfits, I'm going to cite only three because I recently read the books in question.

First and foremost is the unnamed protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Sympathizer." He's the son of a French colonialist father and a Vietnamese mother and in the first sentence of the book, declares himself to be "a man of two faces." A double agent during the Vietnam War and also in the immediate aftermath of that conflict, Nguyen wants readers to believe the views expressed by his character carry more weight than those of either the Americans or the Vietnamese.

Second is "Open City," by Teju Cole, who's protagonist is also biracial -- a white German mother and a black Nigerian father. While he doesn't claim special insight, his nature as a misfit makes him forever an observer, generally dispassionate (perhaps too dispassionate) of everything and everyone he encounters.

Lastly, for the sake of this post at any rate, is Carson McCullers' 1940 classic "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter."  The special character in this case is a deaf mute named John Singer and in large part because of his condition, people on both sides of the racial divide believe him to be fair and emphatic.