Normal People is a story about coming of age, search for self and understanding the world and one’s place in it. It’s about two misfits striving to be normal.
He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.
It’s a story about two self-absorbed Millennials, Marianne and Connell, who are having a on and off again and on and off again relationship. I found that I didn’t care whether their relationship worked or not. In fact, I didn’t care about either one of them and that is primarily why Normal People did not work for me. The characters were two-dimensional, not likable but more importantly, not compelling. Then there was the lack of a plot because there really doesn’t seem to be one, which is probably why I wasn’t able to become invested in the story.
I was perplexed by the lack of quotation marks and found it difficult at times to discern what was dialogue and what was not. I thought long and hard about the absence of quotation marks. Was it to symbolize the insignificance of the words that were spoken? I think both Marianne and Connell would agree.
Both of our protagonists are deeply flawed and these deficiencies feed into each other. Perhaps they think that together they might be more than the sum of their parts but that just never happened. Poor communication is at the heart of their relationship and both feel unworthy and are somewhat paralyzed by low self-esteem. Both seem to suffer from feelings of depersonalization and dissociation.
Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.
Lately he’s consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind.
Both Marianne and Connell tend to be fatalistic and believe the worst of themselves. Feelings of inferiority haunt them and self-castigation abounds.
In just a few weeks’ time Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She’ll be the same person, trapped inside her own body. There’s nowhere she can go that would free her from this. A different place, different people, what does that matter?
Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises.
Connell in particular feels socially awkward and alienated, unsure of how to think and feel.
Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.
They are not stupid people, but they’re not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.
I probably thought if I moved here I would fit in better, he says. You know, I thought I might find more like-minded people or whatever. But honestly, the people here are a lot worse than the people I knew in school.
Marianne on the other hand despises herself and believes this hatred is well deserved.
Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of… I have a coldness about me, I’m difficult to like.
Maybe I want to be treated badly, she says. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person.
I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born.
Were Marianne and Connell ever really in love? While they proclaim their love for each other, I did not get the sense that they were in love. What drew them to each other? Could it be that opposites attract? Sometimes they saw traits in each other that they wished they possessed.
Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him.
When the book begins they are in High School where Marianne is an outcast and doesn’t care what others think of her whereas Connell is popular and concerned with fitting in with his friends. But when they go off to Trinity College, their roles are completely reversed — Marianne becomes the popular one and Connell is the outcast. Having each been in the other’s shoes so to speak, one would think there would be natural empathy for one another but i didn’t see where that happened.
Yet In spite of themselves, they each actually become somewhat of a positive catalyst for the other’s life. That is probably the most surprising and appealing aspect of this book — how one person can significantly influence another’s life and shape it for the better. And as far as being normal, perhaps it is more about growing up, maturing and finding one’s place in the world.
What they had together was normal, a good relationship. The life they were living was the right life.
Marianne is neither admired nor reviled anymore. People have forgotten about her. She’s a normal person now.
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