Transactional Relationships and Schizophrenia in Mr Salary by Sally Rooney

Abstract

This study aims at investigating Sally Rooney’s short story Mr Salary (2016). The complexities around human relationships have always interested Rooney, who asserted that “there is a shared knowledge that relationship forms of the past were not actually suited for everyone” (London Review Bookshop, 2019: 16:11). This is especially true considering the “cultural moment where certainties around relationships have deteriorated slightly” (London Review Bookshop, 2019: 17:17). In this regard, my analysis will develop under two key points. The first is Rooney’s depiction, in Mr Salary, of transactional relationships between the two protagonists, Sukie and Nathan, and between Sukie and her father, Frank, in the face of the economic changes brought about by the Celtic Tiger and post-Crash periods in Ireland. To make this point I will resort to the works of Barros Del Río (2022), Carregal Romero (2023), Bolfarine (2023), among others. The second point will focus on issues related to language, silence and (hindered) communication among the characters in Mr Salary by means of Fredric Jameson’s (1983) notion of schizophrenia, not in the clinical sense, but as a tool derived from cultural theory. According to Jameson, a consequence of global capitalism (as with schizophrenia) is a breakdown of the relationship between signifiers in language—which change the individual’s perception of time trapping them in an eternal present. My analysis will be directed at the way in which Sukie, the protagonist and first-person narrator, undergoes a process that enables her to move away from this eternal present and look into a future of new choices and possibilities.