The Combray Section of Marcel Prousts Swanns Way Essay -- Swanns Wa

The Combray parting of Marcel Prousts Swanns Way The Combray section of Marcel Prousts Swanns Way is an extended surmise on an idyllic past. The book begins, though, not with recollections of Combray, but with a exposition of the narrators half-asleep state, a state of consciousness where he does not know where, or even who, he is. The expanded memories of his past, then, seem an attempt to establish a stable sense of self, a sense that continually eludes him. In this exploration, which constitutes the total of the Combray section, we find the narrator, a young man with literary aspirations, struggling to find out the characters of his childhood in a way that captures their contradictions, provided to find that for each one person seems more like a spectrum of singular, varying selves than a wholeness delimited identity. When we encounter the narrator addressing the problems faced by the artist, he notes that the inventiveness of the first novelist lay in the r ealization that a simplification of characters that corresponds to the quelling of real people inevitably makes novels stronger, more effective in conjuring a sympathetic response from a sensitive reader. A real person, he begins, deeply as we whitethorn sympathize with him, is in a great sum perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a numb(p) weight which our sensibilities become not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. (83) ... ... key to home(a) life. As everyone is guarded, influenced by the conditions that surround them, the social conditions, it seems that only when alone may they be truthful. But instead of confirming this, instead of giving us insight into the core essence of his characters, the truth that all their masks conceal, Proust confounds us by making the confessions imparted in solitude as constructed as any others. In fact, perhaps the only distinguishing factor, is that in solitude, his characters are free to feel and hold in guilt, something they would be reluctant to admit in public. But even in private, their lives are organized as a sort of public confession, as they struggle to maintain the illusion of a stable self. Work Cited Proust, Marcel. Swanns Way. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. NY haphazard House, 1981.