The Evolution of Friendship and Solidarity in Contemporary Fiction Set During Crisis (Normal People and Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney)
Author:
Sham Abdullah Rakaf
Lecturer and researcher in the Department of Languages and Translation at the University of Tabuk, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
doi.org/10.52132/Ajrsp.e.2026.86.2
This paper examines the evolution of friendship and solidarity in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018). Through comparative textual analysis, it investigates how representations of intimate relationships develop across the two novels, from the fluid and often volatile negotiations of early adulthood to a more sustained and adaptive form of interdependence.
Drawing on care ethics (Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 1993) and vulnerability theory (Butler, 2004), the study argues that Rooney portrays friendship not as effortless emotional support but as an ethical practice requiring attentiveness, responsibility, and the acceptance of mutual dependence. In Conversations with Friends, relationships are characterised by overlapping entanglements, power imbalances, and emotional withholding. In Normal People, these dynamics mature into a quieter, temporally extended form of relational autonomy, in which characters learn to negotiate class differences and personal vulnerability through repeated acts of recommitment.
By offering a sustained comparative reading grounded in feminist theory, this paper addresses a gap in existing scholarship, which has tended to analyse the novels separately or through isolated thematic lenses. It demonstrates that Rooney’s early fiction reconfigures solidarity as the everyday labour of living with shared fragility under neoliberal conditions. The study contributes to broader discussions in contemporary literary studies concerning the role of the novel in articulating ethical responses to personal and social precarity.
Keywords:
Sally Rooney, friendship, solidarity, care ethics, vulnerability theory, contemporary Irish fiction, neoliberalism
Academic Journal of Research and Scientific Publishing
