A Summary Of An Outsider
Outsider Essay
An outsider is a person who has been exiled or excluded from society because they are
different in appearance, beliefs, background, behaviour, or mental health. Outsiders may
choose isolation but their victimisation is carried out by society. Romeril's Les Harding is
deliberately portrayed as one of society's innocent victims in contrast with Shakespeare's
murderous Lady Macbeth And John Donne's pathetic death. In John Romeril's surreal
comic tragedy "The Floating World" he uses a narrator to relate his thoughts about the
degeneration of Australian society to the audience, using Les Harding's disintegrating
sanity as a metaphor for this. Romeril portrays Les as a victim of society's materialism
and of the effects of …show more content…
She is unable to fit in with her society, though she and Les ironically seem to
fit in, because of their facades. In "Death be Not Proud" Donne attacks death by likening
it to more pleasant images of "rest and sleep" this contrasts with other more negative
metaphors "slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men". With the use of this
cumulation, and by calling death a "slave", Donne stigmatises death, especially in
line 10:
"And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell"
This stigmatisation of death forces it into a box, and makes it an outsider, because it is
associated with things we fear. Society often stigmatises people it does not understand, or
those that don't fit in with social mores, and Donne does this to death.
Irony is used in all three texts to display the characters as outsiders. The irony in
"Macbeth" is that of Lady Macbeth's obsession with her hands being clean, when
originally she says that just by washing their hands they will clear themselves of
Duncan's blood, and of course guilt of the crime. Lady Macbeth is seen later, in her
sleep obsessing about the cleanliness of her hands:
"Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
An outsider is a person who has been exiled or excluded from society because they are
different in appearance, beliefs, background, behaviour, or mental health. Outsiders may
choose isolation but their victimisation is carried out by society. Romeril's Les Harding is
deliberately portrayed as one of society's innocent victims in contrast with Shakespeare's
murderous Lady Macbeth And John Donne's pathetic death. In John Romeril's surreal
comic tragedy "The Floating World" he uses a narrator to relate his thoughts about the
degeneration of Australian society to the audience, using Les Harding's disintegrating
sanity as a metaphor for this. Romeril portrays Les as a victim of society's materialism
and of the effects of …show more content…
She is unable to fit in with her society, though she and Les ironically seem to
fit in, because of their facades. In "Death be Not Proud" Donne attacks death by likening
it to more pleasant images of "rest and sleep" this contrasts with other more negative
metaphors "slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men". With the use of this
cumulation, and by calling death a "slave", Donne stigmatises death, especially in
line 10:
"And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell"
This stigmatisation of death forces it into a box, and makes it an outsider, because it is
associated with things we fear. Society often stigmatises people it does not understand, or
those that don't fit in with social mores, and Donne does this to death.
Irony is used in all three texts to display the characters as outsiders. The irony in
"Macbeth" is that of Lady Macbeth's obsession with her hands being clean, when
originally she says that just by washing their hands they will clear themselves of
Duncan's blood, and of course guilt of the crime. Lady Macbeth is seen later, in her
sleep obsessing about the cleanliness of her hands:
"Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little