Belonging and alienation

Belonging and alienation are measured in the novel through both public recognition and private connection. Connell can feel accepted as Helen’s boyfriend, yet remain emotionally drawn to Marianne; at Trinity, meanwhile, he discovers that moving from Carricklea has not delivered the community he hoped for. After Rob’s death, he describes his sense of loss in counselling as the disappearance of an entire former life, not merely the loss of one friend. The contrast makes belonging fragile: it may be conferred by social status, sustained by intimacy, or undone by grief and exclusion.

Recognition and social belonging

While travelling in Europe with friends, Connell’s regular video calls with Helen offer reassurance at a distance. He enjoys seeing her and knowing that she continues to love him. Their conversations can feel awkward, particularly when her friends are nearby, and he sometimes wants them to end so he can savour the experience afterwards without the pressure of having to respond correctly. Even so, her affection opens up a way of living that had once seemed impossible to him: he can express love, meet her parents, go to her friends’ parties, and manage ordinary social conversation.

The public recognition of the relationship matters as much as the private affection. When Helen touches his arm or brushes lint from his collar, Connell feels proud and hopes other people are watching. Being known as her boyfriend places him in the social world as an acceptable person; even his silences seem, in that setting, to count as thoughtful rather than awkward. Belonging here is partly a status others can read. It gives Connell confidence in social situations, but it does not remove the different, unresolved pull he feels toward Marianne.

Marianne and the limits of easy acceptance

Connell’s relationship with Helen also clarifies what he associates with social normality. He sees his loyalty, practical outlook, and desire to be thought of as a good person as the parts of himself most compatible with her. With Helen, he does not feel shameful or out of place in the way he sometimes does with Marianne. He regards his relationship with Helen as good and believes he belongs with her.

That certainty does not erase his sense of connection to Marianne. Connell remembers that her wildness once made him feel they shared an unnamed spiritual injury and a common inability to fit into the world, while also recognizing that she had been more deeply damaged than he was. At a college gathering, he sees her emerge in a dark dress among people he does not know. Her familiar expression revives his awareness of the hold he had had over her, and still feels he has. When Helen arrives, Connell turns toward her, takes her bag, and leaves with her; Marianne nods rather than waving goodbye. He is sad for Marianne and for the pain he knows he has caused, but also thinks that he cannot be what she wants. His departure shows how a person may choose an apparently secure social life while remaining conscious of a more unsettling attachment that it cannot contain.

The promised community of Trinity

At Trinity, Connell’s difficulties become more directly social. He tells the counsellor Yvonne that he has few people with whom he genuinely connects. Niall, who encouraged him to seek help, is one possible confidant; Marianne is another, although she is away on an exchange year. Connell describes Marianne as exceptionally intelligent and says they see the world in a similar way. Their shared history in Carricklea makes her absence especially significant: being away from her feels different from being separated from an ordinary college friend.

Connell distinguishes social approval from a sense of belonging. At school, people liked him, and he could be part of a group even when he and Rob did not share many interests or political views. The group’s common setting had been enough to make them friends. At Trinity, he had expected to find more like-minded people, but instead feels that people do not like him as much. He is particularly alienated by students’ repeated comparisons of how much money their parents make. His experience complicates the promise of moving to a more prestigious institution: a new environment does not automatically offer more meaningful connection, and its visible social habits can sharpen rather than relieve his sense of exclusion.

Grief and the lost life

Connell’s account of Rob reveals how bereavement intensifies that alienation. He admits that he and Rob were not close in every respect and that Rob’s behaviour toward girls had sometimes made him uncomfortable. Yet their differences did not prevent friendship when they belonged to the same school group. The relationship was rooted less in complete similarity than in a shared social world. Rob’s death therefore removes not only a friend but also part of the ordinary context in which Connell had known how to belong.

In the session, Connell says that he had left Carricklea expecting a different life, but now hates Dublin and cannot return to the life he left behind. Those friendships are gone, and Rob is gone; he cannot see him again or retrieve the former life. As he speaks, he becomes unwilling to stop, then discovers that he is crying. The patterned tissue box on Yvonne’s table marks the moment when an account of social dissatisfaction becomes visible grief. His sense of alienation is not presented as a simple failure to make friends: it is bound to irreversible change and to the knowledge that the old community cannot be restored.

Counselling and the limits of repair

Yvonne listens, asks whether Connell has people he can talk to, and distinguishes between changing his circumstances and changing how he responds to them. She offers worksheets, photocopied material about anxiety, and a note for the college health service advising them about his depression. Connell accepts the materials and says he will return in two weeks, though he pretends that he plans to complete the worksheets and read the pages. The scene does not resolve his estrangement. Instead, it gives him a place to describe its components: bereavement, the loss of his school friendships, disappointment in Trinity, and difficulty finding people with whom he connects.

The episode also sharpens the difference between being socially included and feeling understood. Connell has people around him and can identify possible friends, yet struggles to find the kind of connection he needs. His account of Rob shows that belonging once depended on the ordinary fact of being in the same group; his account of Trinity shows that proximity and institutional membership do not guarantee that same ease. Across these contrasts, the novel treats belonging as an uneven, relational experience—something that can support a person, fail to satisfy them, and be profoundly altered by loss.