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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Secrecy
Secrets are woven through Normal People’s narrative, from Marianne and Connell’s secret sexual relationship in high school, to the matter-of-fact, nonnegotiable secrecy about the identity of Connell’s father. There are also open secrets, like the fact that Connell’s mother is Marianne’s family’s housekeeper, which they both know but try not to discuss, treating the information as if it were a secret to avoid awkwardness. When Connell learns that his friend group in high school knew he was having sex with Marianne all along, it throws his own self-protective secrecy back in his face, showing him that keeping his relationship with Marianne a secret was a pointless and unnecessary way to cause Marianne pain. He still defaults to secret-keeping, however, when he applies to graduate school in New York without telling Marianne until he’s already been accepted. For her part, Marianne keeps the extent of her family’s abuse close to her chest, only revealing small, incomplete glimpses of it to Connell until her brother breaks her nose.
Apologies
Apologizing plays a prominent role in Normal People, ranging from the routine, almost compulsive apologies that Marianne and Connell frequently exchange, to more momentous ones, like Eric’s drunken apology to Marianne for bullying her in high school. Marianne and Connell, whose relationship is fraught with miscommunication, frequently apologize to one another for something they just said, or when they perceive themselves to be a burden, like when Connell needs to ask Marianne for money after he gets mugged. Both Marianne and Connell also apologize when they get sexually assaulted, with Marianne apologizing to Connell and his friends for “making a fuss” and Connell apologizing to Miss Neary for his drunkenness even while she was assaulting him. In this way, though apologies do occasionally take on greater significance (as when Connell sincerely apologizes to Marianne for his mistreatment of her in high school). The act of apologizing is largely depicted as a way for characters to diminish themselves, take up less space, and eliminate any potential risk of causing a problem to anyone else, even at their own expense.
The Passing of Time
The titles of Normal People’s chapters, which are named after the amount of time that has passed since the previous chapter, hint at the significance and centrality of time’s forward movement to the novel’s framing and narrative. During most of university, Marianne doesn’t work because she says that time is more “real” than money, and that she doesn’t believe in exchanging her limited time for money. Connell often experiences what he describes as time slowing, stopping, or stretching out, sometimes in contradictory ways, such as while he writes emails to Marianne and time seems to simultaneously pass quickly and slow down. Marianne and Connell are both also acutely aware of the length of time in years since their own relationship first became sexual, which is mirrored in Connell’s guilt over and fixation with the two years since his last communication with Rob, his high school friend who dies by suicide. Each chapter, anchored as it is both in an objective measure of time (the month and year) and a subjective one (the amount of time since the previous chapter), reinforces how the passing of time can seemingly be influenced by a person’s perspective, beliefs, and relationships.
