The Misfit

"Although I may look white, Monsieur, I am a black. I am Martiniquais…I have travelled throughout the world, trying to find myself, and I have failed. In effect, I have lost myself."

About the Novel

Caspar is a racially undefined man on a quest for his identity in a world defined by race.

The Misfit is the earliest work in Rose Finkenstaedt's oeuvre — written around 1964, before any of the ten studies, and in many ways the imaginative seed from which everything else grew. It was never published in her lifetime and carries no title of her own choosing; the title was given to it by her daughter.

Its protagonist, Caspar Butler-Brown, grows up in Fort de France, Martinique, believing himself to be the mixed-race son of Calliope Butler-Brown — a Black woman of the Martinique waterfront. He is lighter-skinned than his brother Arnault and sister Melanie, set apart from the beginning, marked by a difference he cannot quite name. When the Catholic nuns at his school separate him from the other children, pushing him toward education and away from his origins, he begins a long journey of displacement — across New York, North Africa, Brazil, and back to Martinique — in search of an identity that every world he enters simultaneously offers and withholds.

In New York he encounters the liberal academic world and its own subtle forms of racial condescension. At Columbia, Professor Hamann condescends to him while believing himself enlightened — one of the novel's sharpest satirical portraits of white liberal paternalism. In North Africa he becomes entangled in Cold War intrigues that expose the global reach of the same racial capitalism he encountered in Martinique. Throughout, he insists on his Black identity: "Although I may look white, Monsieur, I am a black. I am Martiniquais."

The novel's most devastating revelation comes at the end. Returning to Fort de France after his money is exhausted and his revolutionary dreams collapsed, Caspar goes first to dig up the stolen rings he buried as a boy — he has something to bring his mother, he thinks proudly — and then to his mother's hut. He finds it empty. An old woman in the square tells him Calliope Butler-Brown had only one son, Arnault, who went away and never came back. She had no white son. The children she raised were urchins left to her — she took even the ones the nuns refused, because she would do anything for money. "You cannot be her son," the woman says.

In Algeria, at the dinner table with the blonde European agent, Caspar has already arrived at the truth: "I realize that I have sold out once again and that I always will sell out, no matter what I do, because I am a bastard white man." He is not mixed-race. He is not Black. He is white — abandoned, foundling, racially unmoored — a man who spent his life claiming an identity that was never his, in a world that would have denied it to him anyway.

He ends the novel sitting in a café in the Martinique sun, staring at the rings in his hand, facing "the bulk of his life" with no mother, no race, no origin — and no answer to the question of who he is.

Key Passages

"Although I may look white, Monsieur, I am a black. I am Martiniquais. When I was very young, I joined a revolutionary movement in America…I have travelled throughout the world, trying to find myself, and I have failed. In effect, I have lost myself."*

"I realize that I have sold out once again and that I always will sell out, no matter what I do, because I am a bastard white man. I am nothing but an individual and you are my own image of myself and that is why I think I am destroyed."

"You cannot be her son. She only had one son. His name was Arnault…She did not have a white son."

*"I am an individual. That is why I have gone wrong; that is why I am nothing. At the end of my rope, I will rise because you cannot take that away from me because I cannot even sell it. It is, in effect, my doom."

In the Context of the Oeuvre

The Misfit shares with The Irrelevant Saint the novel's deepest preoccupation: racial identity as something unstable, constructed, and ultimately unknowable — something imposed by a world that requires classification, and destroyed by the same world when the classification doesn't hold. Caspar spends his life claiming a Black identity he believes is his by birth, only to discover at the end that it was not. Sanctis, in The Irrelevant Saint, undergoes the opposite journey — a white man who comes to believe he is Black. Together the two novels frame the same argument from either side: that the racial categories Western culture enforces are arbitrary fabrications, and that those who fall across their boundaries — willingly or not — pay the full price of the system's need for order.

This argument, dramatized in fiction in 1964 and 1966, is the same argument Finkenstaedt would spend the next fifty years making in her studies — from the philosophical analysis of Slaves of Freedom to the historical testimony of Face-to-Face. The novels are where it began.

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