The second volume entitled Within a Budding Grove introduces a woman who will become of the most important romantic partners of Marcel despite the fact that she is a lesbian. They stand in opposition to the gentrified symbolic of the nouveau riche who dominate Swann’s Way and thus become a metaphor for the changing of the guard from a society built on class with status assigned at birth to the coming economic revolution in which status can be attained by anyone clever enough to work out how to become rich. The stars of the third volume titled The Guermantes Way are an aristocratic couple whose primary function in the narrative is symbolic. Perhaps this is because Swann’s Way commences the exhaustive process of getting to the end and many readers simply never make it much farther past the tale of the wealthy aesthete who quite unhappily attempts to navigate through a society that places far importance on wealth and financial stability that he is able to generate. Swann gives his name to what is almost surely the most famous single volume that makes up the whole of the text.
Time being, of course, the dominant facet of his recollection of the spatial interplay of societal convention. Readers of every single word will travel with Marcel from childhood to middle-age and join the ride as he indulges in love affairs, friendships and charting the course through a person of his status and personality navigated societal conventions of the time. Not coincidentally, the narrator shares the same first name as the author Proust’s work is considered the very definition of that type of fiction which is autobiography veiled to various degrees of thinness.
Marcel is the narrator of every volume that comprises the more than 4,000 pages that collectively make up In Search of Lost Time. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.
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