Being an Outsider: Jude and Pip’s Search for Belonging In Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, the character Jude experiences life as a complete outsider after moving from a secluded Catholic.
Faglig kvalitetssikret av lærere og toppstudenter · Følger læreplanen (LK20) · Sist oppdatert 2026-10-02
In the course of your studies, you may have worked with literary texts about being an outsider in society.
Read the excerpt from A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara. Write a text in which you compare the character’s experience of being an outsider in society to another character’s experience of being an outsider in another literary text of your choice.
In the novel A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara, we meet the character Jude, who grew up in a Catholic monastery in the USA. After he moves away from the monastery, he starts life in a regular American school. The excerpt describes how Jude finds his new daily life.
He knew French and German. He knew the periodic table. He knew – as much as he didn’t care to – large parts of the Bible almost by memory. He knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it in the right spot. […]
And yet it often seemed he knew nothing of any real value or use, not really. The languages and the math, fine. But daily he was reminded of how much he didn’t know. He had never heard of the sitcoms whose episodes were constantly referenced. He had never been to a movie. He had never gone on vacation. He had never been to summer camp. He had never had pizza or popsicles or macaroni and cheese […]. He had never owned a computer or a phone, he had rarely been allowed to go online. He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful than not owning anything at all. The classroom was the safest place, and the only place he felt fully confident: everything else was an unceasing avalanche of marvels, each more baffling than the next, each another reminder of his bottomless ignorance. He found himself keeping mental lists of new things he had heard and encountered. But he could never ask anyone for answers. To do so would be an admission of extreme otherness, which would invite further questions and would leave him exposed, and which would inevitably lead to conversations he definitely was not prepared to have. He felt, often, not so much foreign – for even the foreign students (even Odval, from a village outside Ulaanbaatar) seemed to understand these references – as from another time altogether: his childhood might well have been spent in the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first, for all he had apparently missed, and for how obscure and merely decorative what he did know seemed to be. How was it that apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if not, how was he ever to catch up?
Being an Outsider: Jude and Pip’s Search for Belonging
In Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, the character Jude experiences life as a complete outsider after moving from a secluded Catholic monastery to a modern American school. Though he is intelligent and knowledgeable in unique, practical skills like wiring lamps and harvesting fruit, Jude feels alienated because he lacks familiarity with the everyday cultural experiences his peers take for granted—like eating pizza or watching sitcoms. What isolates him isn’t just his lack of material possessions, but the deep sense of cultural and emotional disconnect from the people around him. Jude is aware that asking questions would expose his “otherness,” so he remains silent, carrying the burden of shame and confusion alone.
A similar experience of social alienation can be found in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, through the character Pip. Pip, a working-class boy raised by his sister and her husband, feels like an outsider when he is introduced to the wealthy world of Miss Havisham and Estella. Like Jude, Pip becomes hyper-aware of what he lacks—refined manners, formal education, stylish clothes—and begins to internalize a sense of inferiority. His desire to become a "gentleman" reflects his wish to belong to a world that constantly reminds him he does not fit in.
Both Jude and Pip live with a painful awareness of their social and cultural exclusion. Jude’s alienation is quiet and internal, filled with unasked questions and silent observations, while Pip’s is more visible, as he actively tries to transform himself to gain acceptance. Yet in both cases, the feeling of being an outsider is not just about external difference—it is about emotional isolation and the fear of never being enough.
The key difference lies in how the two characters respond to their outsider status. Pip is eventually humbled by experience and comes to value loyalty and honesty over status. Jude, however, remains haunted by his past, and his outsider identity is more deeply rooted in trauma and secrecy, making it harder for him to move forward.
Through Jude and Pip, we learn that being an outsider often means carrying an invisible weight: the fear of exposure, the shame of difference, and the desperate desire to belong. Their stories remind us how powerful—and painful—it is to be excluded from what seems “normal,” and how important empathy and understanding are in helping others feel seen and accepted.