1. While living at home in Carricklea,
Connell’s sense of self is managed by the opinions of his peers in
secondary school. To that end, he avoids being publicly seen with
Marianne, an outcast in school, fearing how their association might
damage his reputation.
Were you critical of Connell for the way he treated Marianne in
school, or were you sympathetic toward his adolescent
self-consciousness? Do you think he became less concerned by the
thoughts of others as he grew older?
2. With Marianne, Connell feels a sense of "total privacy" in which "he
could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would
never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a
door away from normal life and then closing it behind him" (6–7).
Why do you think Connell is sometimes unnerved by their intense and
intimate connection? Further, why do you think he’s unsettled by the
sense that Marianne would do anything to please him?
3. The first time Connell tells Marianne he loves her, we are told that…
She has never believed herself fit to be loved
by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first
moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes,
that was it, the beginning of my life
(46).
Do you think Marianne had ever been told
that she was loved, in any sense of the word, by anyone before Connell?
How can the experience of "first love" transform a person’s self-image
and view of the world?
4. In Normal People, Marianne only
barely opens up to Connell about her relationship with her family—how
her father had been violent when he was alive, how her brother verbally
and physically attacks her, and how her mother essentially forbids her
to believe that she is "special" in any way.
How does Marianne’s family influence her opinion of herself and
affect her relationships with other people? How does she attempt to
distance herself from her family? And how does Connell’s upbringing
compare and contrast to Marianne’s?
5. When they move from the countryside to attend college in Dublin,
there is somewhat of a role reversal between Connell and Marianne.
Connell, once popular in secondary school, is scrutinized and mocked at
Trinity College for his fashion sense and thick Galway accent, and he is
even called a "milk-drinking culchie" (154). Marianne on the other hand,
herself from a wealthy family, moves at ease through an elitist social
scene.
How do class dynamics affect Connell and Marianne in Dublin? How do
their reactions to class prejudice and snobbery shade your view of them
as characters?
6. How would you describe the power that Connell and Marianne hold over
each other? Did you notice a power relation shift and evolve between
them over the years? How might it have had both positive and negative
effects in different moments?
7. Despite being so close, Connell and Marianne sometimes miscommunicate
and misinterpret each other. This can be seen when Connell, unable to
pay rent in Dublin, moves back to Carricklea to save money during the
summer of 2012, after he fails to directly ask Marianne if he can move
in with her.
How does the structure of Normal People, oscillating
between the experiences of both characters during this time, reveal the
ways in which they misunderstood each other? How do you think their
relationship would have turned out differently if Connell had stayed
with Marianne that summer?
8. As the narrative progresses, Marianne becomes increasingly submissive
in her sexual encounters with other people. Why do you think she is so
repulsed by Lukas during "the game" when he tells her that he loves her
(203)? Does she try to separate love from sex? Why do you think she
later asks Connell if he will hit her during sex, and why does she shut
down when he declines?
9. Both Marianne and Connell undergo certain crises of meaning during
their later years in college. For instance, Marianne becomes
increasingly dissociated from herself and from other people when she is
studying in Sweden, and Connell suffers from depression after his friend
Rob commits suicide.
Do you think that people are generally more vulnerable to internal
crises and mental health issues in their late teens and early twenties?
Why or why not? What are the most important support systems and coping
mechanisms for someone going through such a difficult time, and do you
think that Connell and Marianne find them in Normal People?
10. Connell is disillusioned by the contrived and stale performances he
witnesses during a reading at Trinity College Dublin. Consider the
following quote:
It was culture as class performance,
literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false
emotional journeys.… All books were ultimately marketed as status
symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.
Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way
it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of
resistance to anythin
(228).
Do you agree with this assessment? What
kind of "resistance" do you think Connell has in mind? Were you
surprised to find such a critique in a recently published book? Do you
think that by illuminating prejudices and injustices, as well as
commonalities that exist between people, literature might still serve an
important social purpose? You might illustrate your answers by pointing
to passages from Normal People or by referencing other books
that have been released in the past few years.
11. In an interview with The New Yorker, Sally Rooney mentioned
that "A lot of critics have noticed that my books are basically
nineteenth-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing." Would
you agree with this comment? How might Normal People and
Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, be compared,
structurally and thematically, to nineteenth-century romantic
literature?
12. Despite the magnetic attraction that persists between Connell and
Marianne, they are never officially "together" in this book. Considering
the highs and lows they each go through over the years, do you think
that they could have ever had a normatively structured
boyfriend-girlfriend relationship? Did reading this novel lead you to
question why we tend to put rigid labels on our relationships?
13. At the end of Normal People, when Connell is offered a place
in an MFA program in New York, Marianne thinks,
He brought her goodness like a gift and now it
belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all
directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really,
she thinks, really. People can really change one another
(273).
In what ways did you see Marianne and
Connell change each other’s lives? How did they find parts of themselves
in and through each other? Do you worry about what could happen to
Marianne without Connell? Or do you think it might be important for them
to spend time apart and grow independently after college?
14. At times, we see that Marianne considers herself intrinsically
damaged, unlovable, and "bad." In other words, she believes that she
will never be a normal person.
Having read about their innermost insecurities, feelings of
alienation, sexual drives, desires, and so on, do you think that Connell
and Marianne are any more or less "normal" than other people? What
qualifies a person as normal, and do you think that such a completely
normal person can exist?