November 27th

PAG.201 OF NORMAL PEOPLE

“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head”: the sentence underlines the new simultaneous concept of time, typical of the Modern age. Time is simultaneous, is a mixture between past memories and future expectations which fuse together in people’s mind in what is called “stream of consciousness”.

PAG.223 OF NORMAL PEOPLE

SETTING: Connell’s room in one of the days of July 2014

CHARACTERS: Connell and Marianne

ACTIONS: Connell is watching a football match on TV, while Marianne is bored because she wants to be at the center of his attention.

Why does she want it? Maybe because she does not feel reciprocated for what she has done for him. Indeed, she is always ready to help Connell, but at the same time she does not want to be his servant in helping him.

Marianne’s mistakes:

- she submitted herself to Connell;

- she accepted a hidden relationship because she was afraid of losing him and because of the psychological and physical violence she has to suffer from, which make her willing to accept everything, even a hidden relationship.

COVER:

two people inside a tin half opened. The tin gives a sense of protection, but at the same time it is half-opened. It means it can be opened or closed many times, as the relationship between Connell and Marianne is an alternation between positive and negative periods.

WHAT IS THE MOST DIFFFICULT ASPECT OF A RELATIONSHIP?

The difficulty of saying what you think or the difficulty of expressing clearly the feelings.

People in a relationship have to keep some secrets hidden because if a person gives all of her/himself in a relationship, the person cannot recover from the relationship if it does not work. In addition, partners should keep some secret because people generally fall in love with a person they don’t know exactly and if a person reveals everything, the relationship could become monotonous and boring.

Moreover, a psychological study discovers that human beings fall in love with a person they are afraid of or don’t understand at all. Therefore, the mystery of a person brings another person to fall in love of that person.

WOMEN VS MEN

Women are stronger than men.

Men are weaker, but at the same time they want to be strong. Indeed, in the novel Connell wants to be considered stronger than the other men. In addition, Connell suffers much more from social difference than Marianne: he is afraid of the judgement of the people richer than him. Therefore, he sometimes does not feel at ease and this makes him feel weak.

An additional aspect which makes Connell weak is his tendency to remove complex situations, since he cannot cope with them.

On the contrary, it is clearly visible that in the novel Marianne is the strongest character since she has to face both a psychological and physical violence since she was a child. But she is not completely aware of it and therefore unawares she is not used to be valued for what she is.