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Though Marianne’s older brother, Alan, has a pivotal role in Normal People’s plot, he is only lightly characterized. Because the reader can only access Marianne’s family through her eyes, the narration describes very little about Alan other than that he spends his time at home waiting for Marianne to appear so he can terrorize her. To Marianne, Alan is less a fully formed person and more a destructive force, something to fear rather than humanize with details of his personality beyond the inexplicable hatred and violence. When Connell threatens Alan after he breaks Marianne’s nose, Connell is protecting Marianne both from Alan himself and from the menace, dread, and self-hatred she has felt all her life, which Alan has come to symbolize even while also causing literal physical harm.
