To maintain a healthy level of insanity, I've decided to read Proust's Remembrance of Things Lost this summer. All 1.5 million words of it. The use of memory and reflections upon the past are prominently featured throughout the work—especially in the madeline sequence (48-51). Like many other modernist writers, Proust focuses upon sensory details like taste and smell to describe his memories. In these first two chapters, Marcel reflects on his childhood and impressions he has of people. I doubt he is entirely reliable (a modernist technique, no doubt), but he it is his unreliability which is one reason the work is so endearing. Marcel himself seems to realize the problem memories can have in relation to truth. He finds: "We try to discover things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of ideas" (93). How many times has an individual gone back to visit people or places of the past and they are simply not right? They have lost the charm they once had and no longer resemble those precious memories which we have created and cherish.
Marcel delves into the issue of society and its impact upon the characters within the book. Marcel's family falls within the middle class and his compares France's society to a Hindu caste system in which sharply defined castes are determined at birth. One's station in life cannot be changed unless there is "the accident of an exceptional career or of a 'good' marriage" (17). Everyone accepted their role within society and seemed to play the part they had been given happily.
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