Is the Self Ever Whole? Mourning Desire and the Myth of Wholeness in Rooney’s Normal People

Abstract

The question of whether the self can ever achieve wholeness lies at the heart of Sally Rooney's Normal People (2018), a novel that chronicles the intimate yet perpetually fractured relationship between Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan. This study examines the novel through the lens of Jacques Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically focusing on the concepts of the objet petit á and the impossible self. It argues that Normal People functions as an elegy for a wholeness that is constitutively unattainable, portraying desire not as a path to fulfillment but as a perpetual negotiation with absence. The protagonists' compulsive return to one another, their recurrent miscommunications, and their inability to achieve stable identities reveal the Lacanian split subject, a self forever divided between the Imaginary ideal and the Symbolic order's demands. The novel's ache lies not in romantic disappointment but in the melancholic recognition that the self is an ongoing, incomplete subject, perpetually reconstituted through memory, misrecognition, and the inescapable gap between who one is and who one longs to become. The question of whether the self is ever whole receives a definitive answer, yet this impossibility becomes the very condition of desire and connection. Ultimately, Normal People suggests that it is precisely in confronting the impossibility of wholeness that authentic intimacy becomes possible.