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 and Marianne lounge in bed with their computers. They’re trying to decide what fields of study they should apply for in their college applications. Marianne has decided to apply to Trinity College in Dublin, where she wants to study History and Politics. But Connell isn’t so sure. At first, he puts down Law, but he can’t envision himself as a lawyer, so Marianne urges him to study the only thing he's really interested in: English. He worries about not finding a good job with an English degree, but Marianne still encourages him. “The economy’s fucked anyway,” she says.
When considering Marianne and Connell’s relationship, it’s helpful to remember that they are, in many ways, growing up together. They meet in a transitional period in their lives, just before they enter the wider world as adults. Their relationship therefore has the naiveté of first love and the emotional intensity of an adult connection. As they discuss what Connell should study, it becomes clear that Marianne wants to support him and help him find happiness. When she tells him not to worry about his job prospects, she reveals both her desire for him to do what he loves and her naiveté when it comes to financial matters—as a wealthy person, she doesn’t have to worry about such things, but that’s not necessarily the case for Connell.
Themes
Marianne slept at Connell’s house after the first time they had sex. She’d never done it before, but Connell had already slept with a few people. But these past experiences were uncomfortable for him, largely because he knew his sex partners would tell everyone about it the next day—he often had to listen to other people at school narrating his sex life to him later on, which always made him deeply uncomfortable. With Marianne, though, it wasn’t like that. He knew she wouldn’t tell anyone. Having thoroughly enjoyed himself, he kissed her goodbye the following morning and put the bedsheets in the washing machine before his mother came home. But when Lorraine returned, she saw the sheets in the machine and knew what had happened. Laughing, she simply told Connell to use protection.
For somebody as shy as Connell, it would obviously be horrifying to know that everyone in school knew the intimate details of a sexual encounter. Accordingly, sleeping with Marianne is a rewardingly private experience, since Connell knows people won’t come up to him at school and make jokes about what they’ve heard. Privacy, then, is a prerequisite for Connell to truly open himself up to real emotional intimacy—and although his and Marianne’s relationship has some clear flaws because it’s shrouded in secrecy, it’s nothing if not private, allowing him to embrace what it feels like to have an authentic romantic connection.
Themes
In school that week, Connell’s friend Rob asked him what it was like for his mother to clean Marianne’s house. He wanted to know if Connell ever went into Marianne’s and if she treated him like her butler. Connell avoided the questions as much as possible, but the conversation made him feel weird about sleeping with Marianne. He told himself he would break it off with her, but he knew he wouldn’t. By that afternoon, he couldn’t stop thinking about her, so he drove to her house, where they had sex in her bedroom. Relaxing into her touch, he understood for the first time why people go to such great lengths for sexual pleasure.
Connell still doesn’t feel comfortable with the idea of dating Marianne, but he does relish the relationship itself. Still, he doesn’t like hearing Rob talk about Marianne, especially because Rob emphasizes the fact that she’s rich, thus stressing the class differences between them. Although he and Marianne are happy together, then, there are several factors working against them: Connell’s obsession with popularity and their contrasting economic backgrounds, both of which infuse the relationship with an unspoken tension.
Themes
After having sex with Connell, Marianne told him that she liked him a lot—a compliment that made him strangely sad, but in a good way. He sometimes gets like this, feeling a sense of perplexing sorrow. In this case, he saw that Marianne lived a life free of concern about what other people think of her. He, on the other hand, was stuck constantly worrying about how others perceive him. He has tried writing about Marianne to figure out how he feels about her. He likes trying to articulate who she is and how she acts, but he’s always embarrassed about what he’s written.
Connell very much lives inside his own head. Unlike Marianne, who’s capable of living life on her own terms, Connell tries to adjust his life to other people’s expectations. As such, he finds Marianne’s independence remarkable but also completely inscrutable, which is why he tries to write about her, hoping to gain a better understanding of not just her, but of their relationship, too.
Themes
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Back in the present, Marianne and Connell are still lounging in bed and filling out college applications. Marianne encourages him not only to study English, but to do so at Trinity in Dublin. He knows that going to Trinity would take him down an unforeseen path. Sometimes he feels like there are two versions of himself, and though he doesn’t know which of those versions to be, he understands that soon he’ll have to commit to one. If he goes to college in Galway, he’ll more or less keep his current life. He’ll hang out with the same friends and generally lead the existence he’s always assumed he’d lead. But if he goes to Dublin, he’ll have an entirely different life—a more cultured life in which he would have sex with interesting people and talk about literature.
Connell’s thoughts about the future highlight once again that Normal People isn’t just about a complicated romantic relationship, but also about growing up. The decision Connell has to make about college has extra importance because he approaches it as if it will dictate his future identity. For him, it’s not just a choice between two schools but a choice between two sides of his personality. On the one hand, he could stay home and remain more or less the person he is right now, or at least the person he is when he’s around his friends. On the other hand, he could go to Trinity and be a different kind of person—the kind of person he is when he’s around Marianne.
Themes
Connell wonders what the people he’s close to would think if he went to school in Dublin. He knows he’d hardly ever come home to Carricklea if he went to Trinity. Some of his friends would hold that against him, but his mother wouldn’t mind—Lorraine would just want him to be happy. He jokes to Marianne that if they both went to Trinity, she’d probably pretend she didn’t know him. She’s quiet for a moment, and then she says she would never pretend she doesn’t know him.
As Connell considers what his life would be like if he went to college in Dublin, he feels self-conscious about what his friends might think. Once again, he bases his decisions on how other people might perceive him. When he jokes that Marianne would pretend not to know him in Dublin, he subtly implies that he might not fit in at a prestigious school like Trinity, perhaps because he comes from a modest, working-class background. But when he makes this joke, he seems to forget what he’s saying, accidentally bringing up the fact that he’s the one who pretends not to know Marianne. When Marianne replies by saying she’d never do the same thing to him, it’s both a testament to her kindness and a moment of reproach, in which she implies that, although she agrees to go along with their secret relationship, his refusal to acknowledge his affection for her is quite hurtful.
Themes
Connell reflects on the fact that he pretends he doesn’t know Marianne when they’re at school. He doesn’t want his private and public lives to collide. But he also feels awkward about the direction that his conversation with Marianne has taken. He tells her that he’ll apply for English at Trinity. She smiles, and suddenly he feels like he might actually be able to keep his two lives going at the same time—he might be able to have one life in which he acts like he always does with his friends in Carricklea, and another life in which he goes to Trinity with Marianne. But he knows that, as soon as he meets Marianne’s smiling gaze, he won’t believe this anymore.
Connell doesn’t want to merge his two lives because he’s afraid of what might happen to both sides of his current existence. On the one hand, his life as a popular boy in secondary school might be ruined if people find out that he’s involved with Marianne. On the other hand, his relationship with Marianne also might be ruined if his friends make fun of them for secretly seeing each other. Not wanting to lose both, he fantasizes about somehow keeping the disparate parts of his life from merging, but in order to keep them from colliding, it’s obvious that he’ll have to make a decision at some point—in fact, he already has made a decision by deciding to go to Trinity with Marianne, though he doesn’t necessarily see it that way yet.
Themes
