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He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality, which was always the same regardless of what she did or said.
This quotation comes from Three Weeks Later (February 2011), Normal People’s second chapter, and describes Marianne’s confusion about Connell’s perception of her as someone who behaves differently in different circumstances. Because it takes place so early in the novel, this is an important touchpoint for how Marianne perceives herself before the following several years of her relationship with Connell: as someone who is stuck in one identity and unable to change or grow. She goes on to add that any difference in how she acts with Connell is only an aspect of their external relationship, rather than her own inner life, which is a stark contrast to how she will feel by the end of the novel about the power of their relationship to genuinely change who she is.
If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced.
Here, in Three Months Later (November 2011), Connell struggles with the changes to his social life that come with the transition from high school to university. Rather than himself, he credits his high school peers with creating impressions about him and his personality, which reveals how differently Connell views himself from how Marianne views herself. While Marianne believes her personality is entirely internal and no external forces can affect it, Connell believes his is entirely external and he can’t affect it from within. Over the course of Normal People, both Connell and Marianne will come to understand that they have aspects of their personalities that are innate as well as aspects that can change over time due to experiences or, most significantly, relationships.
He couldn’t explain aloud what he finds so absorbing about his emails to Marianne, but he doesn’t feel that it’s trivial. The experience of writing them feels like an expression of a broader and more fundamental principle, something in his identity, or something even more abstract, to do with life itself.”
Here, in Six Months Later (July 2013), during Connell’s summer traveling around Europe, he tries to articulate why he devotes so much time and energy to his lengthy emails to Marianne. When Connell first started at Trinity, he still felt like he didn’t have an innate identity that wasn’t created by the people around him, but in crafting his emails to Marianne, he discovers that writing is an essential and intrinsic aspect of who he is. Though Connell already understood that the people around him could change who he was, this quotation shows that his relationship with Marianne has the power to teach him new things about himself that have nothing to do with how other people see him. Though his writing ends up leading him to New York and an uncertain future with Marianne, she is already inextricably linked to his knowledge of himself as a writer.
They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
In this quote, which comes from the final moments of Normal People in Seven Months Later (February 2015), Marianne realizes that the past several years of her relationship with Connell have culminated in both of them ultimately changing for the better. This contrasts starkly with Marianne’s opinion of herself before her relationship with Connell: at the beginning of the book, she saw herself as someone who was always stubbornly trapped in an unchanging personality, no matter how much she tried to be different. Though the novel ends on an inconclusive note as to the status of Marianne and Connell’s future relationship, this quotation shows the completion of a central thematic arc for Normal People as well as an important emotional arc for Marianne in particular. Not only has Marianne changed in positive ways thanks to Connell, but she has also learned the invaluable lesson that change for her, and because of another person, is possible at all.
