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This article analyses the concepts of patriarchy and fragility as presented in Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Drawing from bell hooks’s theories on masculinity in The Will to Change, fragility is understood as a fundamental underside to the performance of domination in patriarchal identity. After analysing the aggressive yet insecure behaviours of the novel’s secondary male characters, I focus on Connell, whose sensitivity has been embraced in popular culture as contributing to new forms of masculinity. I argue it is through him that Rooney most thoroughly explores the damaging persistence of patriarchal ideology in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Literary form, particularly free indirect style, is seen to capture the fragility of his subjectivity in relation to the hegemonic order of patriarchy. I examine his (limited) passage from compartmentalization, which results in toxic secrecy with Marianne, towards integrity, a state which is inverse to, yet partially manifests out of, fragility.