Nick Hornby High Fidelity Analysis

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In Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, it tells a story about a music obsessed man in his mid-thirties named Rob Fleming, who is the owner of a somewhat failing record shop called Championship Vinyl in London. It starts out with his girlfriend, Laura Lydon, leaving him which causes him to backtrack to his top five breakups and evaluating those past relationships. The book goes into depth about the turbulent journey Rob endures with his emotions along with his inability to move on from Laura, and how music intertwines with every aspect of his life. To that effect, Nick Hornby illustrates the emotional struggles that Rob experiences when he is faced with wanting his freedom and the conflict of also desiring a meaningful relationship that is long-lasting. …show more content…
This can be seen when Rob and Laura go to her friends’ Paul and Miranda’s place for dinner, as Rob recognizes that by attending, it is an important way of showing Laura that he is invested in her. Considering that previously, when they were invited to Paul and Miranda’s, Rob had refused to go, and when Laura had invited them to their place, he had gone out for hours until it was long past midnight to ensure that he would not come across them. During the dinner, Rob realizes that they are great people whom he genuinely enjoys spending time with, and when Laura asks him to look at their records, to Rob’s dismay, it is a “disaster area” with the kind of music that should be “shipped off to some Third World waste dump” (279). Normally, Rob would diss people if their music taste was what he defined as bad, but in the case of Paul and Miranda, he realizes that it may not be “what you like but what you’re like that’s important” (280). This is a big stepping stone for Rob because it can be seen that he is beginning to mature, especially seeing that it opposes his initial thoughts when Dick and Barry and him “agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like” (117). In addition, Rob and Laura are at a pub and he tells her that he’s tired of thinking about love and marriage, and that he was always afraid of it because he wanted his freedom. But he realized that it was the opposite and explains to her that “if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things” (318). In other words, Rob is asking her to marry him and although Laura simply says “thank you,” she recognizes that he is putting an effort in their relationship and that he has outgrown his juvenile behaviour by asking her. On the contrary,

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