Connell decides to apply for English at Trinity College Dublin

Connell’s decision to apply for English at Trinity College Dublin is a turning point in which a university application becomes a choice between two imagined selves. Marianne prompts him to name Trinity as a possibility, but his answer is bound up with fear: he wants a different future and her respect, yet worries that leaving Carricklea will cost him the identity and social security he knows.

The choice between two futures

Connell is looking at a college webpage when Marianne suggests that he apply for English at Trinity. He has been imagining himself as two separate people who will eventually have to choose which life to inhabit. Galway would let him remain with his familiar social group and follow the plan he has always had: earn a good degree, have a girlfriend, and be regarded as someone who has done well for himself. Trinity, by contrast, would place him in a life he associates with Marianne, one that seems culturally and socially unfamiliar.

His picture of that alternative is deliberately ambivalent. He imagines dinner parties and conversations about the Greek bailout, but also a departure from Carricklea toward places such as London or Barcelona. In that future, some people might think he had gone badly astray, while others might forget him. The choice is not simply between two courses of study: it asks whether he can relinquish the approval attached to the person his friends already know.

Marianne’s place in the decision

Marianne’s recommendation carries weight because Connell values her judgment and fears what a shared future might mean for their connection. He tells her that if they were both in Dublin, she might pretend not to know him if they met. Her silence makes him anxious; when she assures him she would never do that, his immediate fear of being beneath her notice eases.

The exchange also brings their private relationship into view. Connell acknowledges that at school he pretends not to know Marianne, because he believes that discovery of their secret relationship would ruin his standing among his friends. He keeps his public and private lives apart, imagining that he can preserve both without having to confront what kind of person he wants to become. His fear of losing Marianne and his fear of social exposure therefore press against the same decision.

The declaration and its limits

After Marianne says she would not disown him, Connell agrees to put down English at Trinity. He gives little weight to getting a job, and Marianne smiles as though she has won the argument. The moment turns a possibility into a stated intention, but it does not resolve his uncertainty about the life that would follow.

For a few seconds, Connell tries to believe he can keep both worlds: be respected by Marianne while remaining well liked at school, and move between separate versions of himself without having to choose. The thought comforts him precisely because he knows it cannot last. He avoids Marianne’s eyes to sustain it, aware that looking at her would undo the illusion.

What the decision reveals

The scene makes the application a measure of Connell’s divided sense of belonging. Carricklea offers continuity and recognition, but that security depends on maintaining a public identity that excludes Marianne. Trinity represents a break with that arrangement, though Connell cannot yet imagine the change without also fearing judgment, obscurity, and loss.

His answer is influenced by Marianne, but the decision remains his: he accepts a future that he has imagined as socially uncertain because the alternative seems to preserve a self he increasingly experiences as incomplete. The scene thus frames the application not as a simple declaration of ambition, but as an attempted passage between two lives—and as an early sign that he cannot indefinitely keep them separate.