In her novel Normal People, Sally Rooney exposes the hidden reasoning of our subconscious. She does so primarily by translating into clear words the opaque subconscious reasoning of both her protagonists, Connell and Marianne. If they were real people, these characters would experience their thoughts not as Rooney’s sentences but as intuitive feelings and inarticulate notions. But we as readers get privileged access to their thoughts and feelings through the backdoor entrance of Rooney’s prose. This special access has two major effects. One, we understand these characters intimately. In a way perhaps that they would not understand themselves. And two, we are reminded that we also experience internally an unending stream of unrefined thought. We too are partially in the dark about our intentions and motivations. That this level of semiconscious thought exists and that our understanding of it can be sharpened through introspection and articulation are useful observations Rooney offers us.

Another way that Rooney puts unconscious reasoning on display in her book is by having her characters make choices that seem unmotivated or arbitrary, but prove meaningful in effect. Following are two examples of this, one minor and one major.

A minor example is when Connell and his mother Lorraine give Marianne a ride home from the grocery store. Connell chooses to drop his mother off first. Is it a coincidence that this gives him some private time with Marianne? Lorraine begins collecting the groceries to take them inside, but Connell stops her and says he will do it later. This seems at first an odd detail for the author to include. But its purpose becomes clear when Connell declines Marianne’s invitation to come in for tea. Oh, I would, but there’s ice cream in the boot. Rooney is showing us that this was a calculated decision. Connell contrived the situation to contain a convenient excuse. What isn’t clear is whether Connell is fully conscious of his calculations. It seems like the kind of decision he might recognize only in retrospect as deliberate. And until he does, until he admits to himself that only some of his decisions are made in full consciousness, he cannot be fully selfaware.

A similar but more major example is Marianne’s choice to tell Connell that her new boyfriend Jamie is a sadist. On the surface, this is a bizarre choice. Why confess this, unprompted, to an ex-boyfriend? Is she being cruel, trying to make Connell jealous? When Connell reacts with alarm, Marianne plays it off with a “cute little smile.” Nonchalantly, she continues. [He] likes to beat me up. Just during sex, that is. Not during arguments. Marianne’s behavior seems odd and clumnsy, but it’s not. She has invited Connell for coffee to tell him – the same person to whom she confided about being physically abused by her father – that her new boyfriend beats her up during sex. She is crying for help. Or at least for some sort of attention. But is she doing this with awareness? Is her casual tone a mask to hide her feelings from Connell? Or is she concealing them from herself as well? Her amusement is likely a real feeling encasing the truer feelings of desperation and selfloathing. This enigmatic form of communication reflects the contradiction inside Marianne. She cannot yet confront the dire state of her selfesteem but she also cannot ignore it. To appease both of these great psychic forces, her subconscious has crafted an encrypted message that Marianne can deliver unconsciously and that Connell can hopefully decipher and heed. The message is Help. Help me recognize the abuse I’ve endured as abuse and as the true source of the bad feelings I have for myself.

Marianne cannot take the first step towards rehabilitating her selfesteem alone. She needs a witness who will point at her abuse and call it such. On some level, she knows she is a victim of abuse, but how can she trust herself if her own mother gaslights her about it? It would take immense selfbelief to assert without anybody’s support that all her family members are traitorous liars that arbitrarily treat her like garbage. How can she muster the strength to believe this when her experience in school seemed to confirm that she is indeed worthy of blind spite and scorn? This is why Marianne needs Connell to say Your family treats you horribly and it’s not your fault that they do. Recognizing the abuse as abuse is the first step towards believing that she is not bad. Marianne cannot even begin the lengthy process of unlearning her feeling of worthlessness until she recognizes that I am inherently bad is a lie she tells herself to understand the abuse she endures as something other than abuse. Until then, this lie keeps Marianne sane. It gives a semblance of coherence to the paradox she cannot unwind. Why does my family treat me so badly if they love me?

Marianne’s choice of subjecting herself to the clutches of a sadist is an example of what psychotherapists call “acting out” feelings. It’s a puzzling concept that I find compelling. Marianne has an unconscious need to process the awful trauma her family has inflicted on her, but she cannot find the psychological and emotional safety to do so consciously. This tension finds release in her “acting out” her feelings by humiliating and degrading herself. Marianne cannot yet identify her lack of selfesteem as caused by the cruelty and violence inflicted arbitarily on her by her family. Instead, she locates the problem inside herself. She figures there is a fundamental “coldness” that belongs to her and for which she is ultimately responsible.

Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of… I have a coldness about me. I’m difficult to like.

To reflect this belief, Marianne routinely attaches to people that will make her feel bad about herself. Jamie her sadistic boyfriend is not the first. Nor is her toxic friend Peggy. Before these was Connell.

Marianne’s relationship with Connell was founded on the basis that he is superior and that Marianne should content herself with his private attention even as he pretends not to know her in public. Indeed, part of his magnetism is that he simultaneously affirms and dismisses Marianne’s feeling of inadequacy. He gives and withdraws affection cyclically, allowing her to experience both assurance that she is lovable and confirmation that she is not. All this is in the subtext until Marianne spells it out to him over coffee:

I didn’t need to play any games with you. It was real. With Jamie it’s like I’m acting a part, I just pretend to feel that way, like I’m in his power. But with you that really was the dynamic, I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to.

Marianne punctuates this point by asking:

Who wouldn’t want to beat me up?

And here we turn to Connell’s side of the equation, first by noticing that his response to this rhetorical question fails to reassure Marianne that she does not deserve to be beaten up.

I wouldn’t. Maybe I’m kind of unfashionable in that way.

Connell says he wouldn’t beat her up because he’s not into that sort of thing. Significantly, he does not reject her statements of selfloathing. Would it be too far to say he is agreeing with her by omission? That his lack of response functions as a veiled agreement?

Time and time again Connell has chosen not to address Marianne’s feelings of inadequacy. Despite how humiliating Marianne’s position was in their secret relationship, Connell kept her there. Again and again he chose not to rectify this disrespect. And when circumstances threatened to reveal the truth, he betrayed and abandoned her. And perhaps this choice genuinely sprang wholly from cowardice, from fear of public rebuke for dating Marianne. But is there some part of Connell that enjoyed dominating Marianne? There are certainly signs after they rekindle their romance in university. For example, in response to sexual flattery from her, he laughes in delight and says:

Marianne, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.

Not God made us for each other. No, God made you for me. Awareness and desire for his superiority lives somewhere in Connell’s consciousness. There is a moment when it bubbles up into his conscious mind and it frightens him. When Marianne says she wouldn’t enjoy a threesome but would do it if Connell so desired, Connell becomes suddenly aware:

She comes to sit down with him and he touches her cheek. He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why he thought about it. Maybe he wants to do it. But it makes him feel sick.

Where is this intrusive thought intruding from? Is it a coincidence that this occurs to Connell, considering that repeatedly throughout their relationship he has failed to uplift her and thus, by omission, pushed her down?

Sally Rooney gives us many hints that there is an unhealthiness in the couple’s dynamic. For example, when Connell apologizes to Marianne for degrading her in high school, he adds that it “wouldn’t have mattered” if people had found out about their relationship because, it turns out, it wouldn’t have harmed his reputation anyway. This struck me as an insensitive and insolent comment. Connell should be apologizing that he didn’t have the courage to make their relationship public even if it would have made people think differently about him. He should be apologizing for making Marianne pay in humiliation for his gross lack of integrity. Marianne again fails to stand up for herself and instead of demanding that Connell recognize more fully what he did, she says I didn’t tell anyone, I swear to god.

Normal People implores us to examine the invisible reasoning behind our decision making. If we tune in and listen to our silent thoughts, what might we hear? What might we learn by noticing who we bring into our lives and what treatment we encourage and accept from them? We like to think that who we are is up to us, but we already exist by the time we get around to the task of defining ourselves. The primary task is to listen. Observe. What are the real motivations behind our actions? Who are we, really?

Good fiction offer us the means for answering these questions about ourselves by teaching us to answer the same questions about fictional characters. A good story is a wealth of observations woven into narrative, that ancient and singularly powerful mode of thought and communication. The world of literature is a mental arena where we can witness and experience things we will never see in life, a place of insight through simulation and observation. A waking dream. At its best, it is a birthing site of knowledge. For literary critic Harold Bloom, Shakespeare’s works form the pinnacle of this experience:

When you really have a deep relationship to [Shakespeare’s] works, then you change. You start, indeed like Shakespearean characters, overhearing yourself.