While it seems natural that outsider would play a heavy role in novels as well as most other literature, at times I have to stop and think, "so what?" Of course outsiders are prominently featured in novels, because most people would not be terribly interested in reading a book about an everyday life that he or she witnesses on an every day basis. But here is where my reasoning reveals the misconception. We tend to view outsider as people who are different. However, when you think about it many people have some particular trait that makes them very different from others, yet we rarely classify them as outsiders: even though they may have different or religions, colors, or behavior, these people usually live basically the same live that "we" do. This is where the problem lies: we frequently are too generous about granting outsider status to anyone in a novel, thus cheapening the idea of an outsider and making the answer to the "so what?" question an equally useless "dunno."
I do not have the one single solution to the problem of classifying the outsider, but I would think it should require something severe, something that actually forces a character to be severely disconnected from everyone else in the world or at a minimum, his or her surroundings within the book. Someone who just speaks more slowly than others, or has a receding hair line, or has 7 freckles on their body is not an outsider because of it.
Damn outsider impersonators...
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