The Experience of Being On The Inside With That of Being on the Outside

We all know what its like to be on the inside and on the outside. High school was full of various ups and downs that made us feel on top of the world one day and at the bottom of the food chain the next. Some of us have gone through life feeling on the outside, without anywhere to turn. In Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Montaigne’s Essays, and Shakespeare’s Othello, the experiences of being on the inside with that of being on the outside are often hard to differentiate.
In Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, the distinction between the outside and the inside involves the outside of Pantagruel’s mouth with the world inside his mouth. When Alcofribas first descended into Pantagruel’s mouth, he discovered a man planting cabbage. He found that there were several people living in Pantagruel’s mouth that fed off of the birds that flew in and the food that Pantagruel had eaten. The people had learned to survive in there for some time. Alcofribas soon...