54 pages • 1 hour read
Sally RooneyBeautiful World, Where Are You
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Alice Kelleher
Alice Kelleher is a 29-year-old famous novelist who stays in the Irish countryside after recovering from a mental health crisis. Alice grew up in a poor, unstable home, and spent time after college working in cafés before her first manuscript received a generous offer. Now rich and regrettably famous, Alice struggles with reconciling her public image and private personhood.
Alice much prefers to intellectualize her feelings rather than endure the lived experience. When in college, Eileen said Alice had “a very loud speaking voice, dressed in ill-fitting second-hand clothes and seemed to find everything hilarious” (29). This memory of college-age Alice contrasts with the present character; when meeting new acquaintances, Alice comes across as brusque, intimidating, and argumentative “by the way [she] acts, putting the fear of God into people” (300) through biting intellectual quips. While this brings her commercial success through her writing, it hampers her emotional wellbeing.
Alice writes emails to Eileen, wherein she philosophizes and commiserates about the miseries of humanity. She occasionally slips out of communication with friends, and though Eileen says she’s establishing herself as rarified, prestigious figure, Alice struggles with depression and the need to “prove that [she] was a special person” (233), especially in hearing Eileen, her best friend, describe her as boldly avant-garde. Alice takes all of this pressure to heart. As for her own self-appraisal, Alice sees herself as a cultural “artefact” that is “just a little bubble winking at the brim of our civilisation. And when it’s gone, I’ll be gone” (187). Alice struggles throughout the novel with identifying her place in society and preserving her lived experiences through art, whether they be intellectual or emotional exploits.
Alice has a near-religious devotion to artistic creation, as if “God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before” (235). The frustration of this “special gift” is that with its fruition comes the accumulated stress of being a public figure.
Alice is like Simon in that she prefers to not let anyone into her private life for fear of rejection. Her friends are everything to her because she has nothing in common with her family—but at the same time, she has very few friends, and so her caution actually isolates her.
Alice’s intellectual haughtiness, as emotional armor, impedes her relationships. Felix challenges her to become more open and vulnerable in her personal life, and when she faces her hardened habits, she begins to actually feel the happiness of a “beautiful world” rather than just philosophize about it.
As Alice ages, she admits, “I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness” (233). In recognizing the commonality of her feelings, Alice tunes into a shared sense of humanity, which fulfills her more than her childish ambitions of travelling the world and leading a “glamorous life.”
Eileen Lydon
Eileen Lydon is a 29-year-old editorial assistant living in Dublin. Her parents are working-class: a farmer and a teacher. She has one older sister named Lola, who “had been sturdy, brave, mischievous, while Eileen had been anxious and often ill” (26) during childhood. At the tender age of 15, Eileen developed a crush on the college student Simon, who reassured her they would always be friends.
At 18, Eileen studied English at university, where she met her roommate, Alice, who describes Eileen as a “celebrity,” saying that “[e]veryone was in love with her. She was always winning prizes and having her photograph in the university paper and that kind of thing” (80). Eileen leaned shyly into this newfound popularity, but as the years pass, she slips into apparent obscurity, enduring the end of a long and unsatisfying relationship and renting a shared apartment on a meager salary.
Ultimately, in the pursuit of deeper emotional intimacy in her personal relationships, Eileen confronts her own misconceptions of self, saying, “I thought it would be the same as everything else in my life—difficult and sad—because I was a difficult and sad person. But that’s not what I am anymore, if I ever was” (336).
In trying to please everyone around her, Eileen once clung to Alice’s description of her as “a genius and a pearl beyond price, and that even the people who really appreciated her still didn’t appreciate her enough” (30). When she interrogates herself about life ambitions, however, her vision is rural, even pastoral. She pictures an identical scene from when she was a child: “a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all” (212). This simple existence is idealized, but it also is very different from the adult existence Eileen once wished for, hinting that while she is aware of her emotional state, she hasn’t yet fully attuned her outlook to her lived experiences accurately or hopefully.
Felix Brady
Felix Brady, a 29-year-old warehouse worker in Dublin, meets Alice through a dating app. Attractive and dark-haired, he exudes a boyish charisma and a quick temper. He comes from an Irish working-class background and has a rakish reputation about town as a spendthrift and a flirt. His friends are all similarly working-class—and they are so unlike Eileen, Simon, and Alice—that Felix warns the latter before a party not to be overly intellectual or pretentious.
His working-class background does more determine his material life circumstances—it gives him insight into the unexamined privileges of the intellectual and social elite. Explaining his thoughts on why he and Alice fight so often, Felix says to her, “See, you’re used to getting treated differently […] From people who know about you and think you’re really important and everything. And then when I treat you in a normal way it’s not good enough” (301). Throughout the novel, Felix’s working class informs his manner of communication, and because his language is more gauche than that of intellectualizing Alice, he finds her answers too guarded for establishing a common ground. His challenge in establishing emotional intimacy with Alice involves wading through the disparity in their material living conditions.
He and Alice end up bonding over identical feelings of depression and loss; despite their class differences, they have a fundamentally human communion.
Simon Costigan
Simon Costigan lived across the river from Eileen while growing up. Now 34, he stands 6 foot 3, with blond hair and a neat appearance. He works as a legal consultant for a left-wing political group and spends his workdays in international meetings about human rights and refugee crises, although he humbly asserts that his work contributes little good to society. Eileen good-naturedly mocks him for his “oddly formal” text messages.
He seems stoic and utterly blameless, but Alice condemns this as a front and a serious martyr complex: “He never needs anything from anyone, and he thinks that makes him a superior being. Whereas in reality he just leads a sad sterile life, sitting alone in his apartment telling himself what a good person he is” (314). Perhaps because of his Catholic affiliation, Simon prefers to stick with ritual and impersonal supernatural abstraction when it comes to moral quandaries. In doing so, however, he gives off an arrogant vibe that Felix describes as holier-than-thou.
Simon is incredibly handsome and knows it, with Alice once alleging a degree of narcissism. After meeting him, Felix disagrees, speculating that Simon is miserable. Simon’s father has his own theory that Simon has a Messiah complex, and “wants to go around saving people because it makes [him] feel powerful and virile or whatever” (149). In contrast to these damning characterizations, Simon avoids strictly defining his own identity, preferring to dedicate his life to the concepts of God and to Eileen’s romantic happiness. These pursuits are met with inner conflict, however, when he realizes that true interpersonal connection is only ever achieved through vulnerability and emotional intimacy.
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