Normal People: Kudos to Vulnerability, A Tribute to Friendship

Abstract

This paper intends to undergo a comparative study on George Eliot‘s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Sally Rooney‘s Normal People (2018). The nature friendships the characters display in the aforementioned novels are of various attributes. Principles of religious, economical, racial, and societal heritage come together to delineate the relationship the four characters experience and brandish. The theme of power struggle in interpersonal relationships and the related parameters in play will be discussed through the ideas of Michelle Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, Frank Lovett, Jacques Derrida, and Aristotle. Among the defining factors to be tended to, vulnerability, the element of time –futurity-, death, and the approach towards ―the other‖ are dominant. An almost two century-interval between the two literary works has marked a tremendous difference in the attitude of the protagonists towards friendship and conversion. The paper attempts to explore the inevitable factors, defining a friendship, the constituents empowering it along with those reducing it to an entity of its own negation.