Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Normal People, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love, Inexperience, and Emotional Intensity
Identity, Insecurity, and Social Status
Miscommunication and Assumptions
Money, Class, and Entitlement
Summary
Analysis
Connell sits in the kitchen drinking a beer. Lorraine comes home and tells him that someone he went to school with is pregnant. He has already heard—the person was actually his first girlfriend. He wonders aloud if she’s anti-abortion, but Lorraine criticizes him for being cynical, saying there are other reasons people have babies. Connell then asks if Lorraine ever regretted having him, wondering if she thinks she could have had a better life if she hadn’t. The question scares Lorraine, who thinks he’s hinting that Marianne is pregnant. Connell gets upset about her assumption that he and Marianne are still together, so he acts cold toward his mother, but then he feels bad about alienating everyone who has ever cared about him.
Throughout the novel, Lorraine has tried to urge Connell to acknowledge that Marianne is—for all intents and purposes—his girlfriend. Even after all these years, though, he still insists that they aren’t together like that. And yet, he literally just had sex upstairs with Marianne, so Lorraine’s assumptions about their relationship aren’t misguided. Rather, she seems to have more clarity than Connell does when it comes to him and Marianne, as she understands that they’re emotionally connected as lovers even if they don’t always define themselves as such.
Themes
Connell’s phone starts ringing. Lorraine has just gone to bed, and he’s still sitting in the kitchen. When he picks up, he hears Marianne’s voice. She sounds distressed. She says she “tripped or something” and that she hates to bother him but doesn’t know what else to do. He tells her he’s on his way. When she opens the door of her house, he sees that her nose is bleeding and that her eyes are raw, like she’s been crying. Her wrist has dried blood on it, too. The sight of her like this makes Connell’s vision swarm. She says she thinks her nose is broken, and then Alan appears behind her.
Regardless of how Connell and Marianne define their relationship, there’s no denying that they have an extremely close bond—so close, in fact, that Connell can’t bear the idea of anyone hurting her. It was hard enough for him to think about Jamie hitting Marianne during sex, a situation that she at least consented to. As he pieces together the fact that Alan is responsible for her bloody nose, then, it’s all Connell can do to maintain his composure.
Themes
Connell tells Marianne to get in the car. She slips out of the house and gets into the passenger’s seat. Connell then steps inside the house and closes the door. He walks up to Alan, who insists he didn’t do anything. Alan is against the railing of the stairs and suddenly looks weak and frightened. “If you ever touch Marianne again, I’ll kill you,” Connell says. He adds that he’ll also kill him if he says anything nasty to Marianne ever again. Through tears, Alan says he understands, and then Connell leaves. In the car, Marianne apologizes for disturbing Connell, but he tells her not to say sorry. He loves her and will never let anything bad happen to her again.
Connell and Marianne are very protective of one another. When Connell told Marianne about how Miss Neary took advantage of him, she vowed to kill Miss Neary if it ever happened again. Similarly, Connell threatens to kill Alan if he continues to abuse Marianne. On the whole, their protective impulses underscore just how intensely they care for one another.
Themes
