SECTION “SEVEN MOTNTHS LATER” OF ORMAL PEOPLE
- SPEAKING VOICE: 3rd person narrator who speaks from Marianne’s point of view
- ACTIONS: she is making American coffee, and watching outside
- CHARACTERS: Marianne
- SETTING: Marianne’s house in Dublin
- After making coffee, Marianne looks outside the window, but she can’t because there is a barrier between her and the outside because of the mist of her breath. The reader can understand how the landscape is, thanks to Marianne’s eyes. So, the narrator exploits her to let the reader know how the outside is.
- Does the beginning remind you of another beginning? Yes, it reminds me of Evelyne’s beginning by James Joyce. What makes them similar? The setting: it is an inner one. Both Marianne and Evelyne are inside. But, while Joyce focuses the attention on Evelyne and on the time, the narrator in Sally Rooney focuses the attention on the setting and on the relationship Marianne has the setting and therefore the attention is focused on the space. This underlines the different periods which the novel belongs: Evelyne is a Modernist one, while Normal People is a Postmodernist one. In addition, while in Evelyne Joyce wants to keep a certain distance with the outside, in Normal People the outside enters gradually to the inside.
- “People have forgotten her” --> result: she is a normal person now. Being normal means being a cloud, a ghost without a specific personality. Marianne has lost the heroic shadow she had at the beginning
- “She walks… in the evening” --> no one looks at her. She feels normal
- Dublin: personification. This justifies the use of “beautiful”, an adjective used for women
- “She wipes…” --> the narrator tells about Marianne’s ordinary routine at work. This reinforces the idea she does the same things of other people now, because she is normal.
Virginia Wolf in The Narrow Bridge of Modern Art: “The novel, that cannibal”. The sentence means the novel “eats” all the other genres.
James uses the symbolic realism: he focuses the attention on trivial objects which become the symbol of something else.
