Combray: Section 1

The novel opens with the narrator drifting in and out of consciousness, describing all the thoughts and memories that sneak into his mind as fatigue blurs out his rational thinking. The main story told was from his childhood, he recounted the days spent in his grandparents’ house where he was sent to bed early to face his insomnia alone as the adults continued with dinner. His only consolation was the anticipation of his mother’s goodnight kiss, which was frowned upon by his father. The only nights where his mother did not come upstairs to kiss him were the evenings when they had guests over, usually M. Swann, who the narrator described as “the unconscious author of my sufferings (p. 44).”

At the beginning of this reading, I struggled with the complex writing and lengthy sentences. It was difficult to follow the narrator’s story as he jumped from himself to others and from the future to the past. I kept circling back and re-reading paragraphs because of confusion surrounding the setting and characters, which increased my frustration and impatience. However, when I started to just read forward, the pieces fell together in a much more coherent manner and the story of the narrator’s childhood in Combray slowly began to unfold. A quote that stood out to me was from M. Swann’s father about the death of his wife: “It’s odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can’t think of her for long at a time (p. 15).” This line perfectly captures some people’s grief after the loss of a loved one; you find their presence in everyday things such as a brush of wind or a distant melody, but you cannot bear to think about them for too long before the pain of their absence creeps in. 

Combray: Section 2

Entering the second section of the story, it appears that the narrator jumped further back in time to relive the memories spent at his Aunt Léonie’s house. Although the narrator does a wonderful job painting a picture of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (Combray’s church), the length and complexity of his sentences somehow escalated. There were instances when I finished a sentence but had to search for the beginning of it to remember what he was talking about in the first place. Overall, Proust’s writing was deep and thoughtful, revealing fragments of his past life to show readers the intricacy of human relationships and memories.

Questions

The narrator experiences high levels of anxiety before bed, leading to my question “What makes the character so anxious before bedtime? Is it external factors (such as his family) or internal factors (such as the fear of being alone)?” Ever since his Uncle Octave (Léonie’s husband) died, his aunt has been “always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession, and piety (p. 50).” This leads me to wonder if the narrator’s anxiety was perpetuated by his aunt’s mental health, as she was plagued with the belief of getting sick.