Swann’s Way is taken from Proust’s book-length masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. At first glance I was shocked by the length of Proust’s book, In Search of Lost Time. As I read it in detail, I realized that it seemed like a memoir of the author, Proust. Starting from the author’s childhood, he describes his first love, his lost love, his family life, from which we can find his perception of the world and life. Some people say that Proust’s book is one of the most difficult literature in the world to read, and I think the reason why it is difficult to read may be because there seems to be no unique theme in this book. It doesn’t have a very clear theme and carries out an extension around that theme like those novels that we often read. In this book, Proust does not have a very definite theme and often makes the reader think that it has multiple themes, when multiple themes in another way is actually no theme at all.

Of course, if we have to elaborate on the theme of the book, I think we can get a glimpse of it from the first and most famous sentence of the opening chapter: “For a long time, I went to bed early.” This is not written to anyone, it is Proust’s own recollections, his murmurings, his sorrows, and he uses time as a thread to articulate his thoughts and write about his life. We can see at the same time that in this book Proust’s portrayal of emotions is very delicate.

First of all, he first describes the usual sleeping, and then on this day, I lost my sleep. Thus, we are made to understand that this is a story caused by insomnia. Normally, insomnia is a state where you want to fall asleep and have fallen asleep in a trance, but you feel like you can’t sleep all the time a tossing and turning situation. In this half-asleep state, we often have some memories and some imaginations replaying over and over again in our minds. From the perspective of insomnia, the author cuts to the perspective of sleeping habits: I must have my mother give me a good night kiss before I can sleep peacefully. So what was unusual about this day? Unusual in that my mother didn’t give me a goodnight kiss because there were guests in the house. Because adults felt it was rude to have guests, they could not have goodnight kisses, thus causing my insomnia. In this paragraph, we can see the subtlety of the author’s description and the richness of her emotions.

My question for this week is: We can find Proust’s descriptions of emotions or memories are fragmented, not very specific yet focused, so do you think this fragmentation is more or less likely to resonate with the reader? Do you think the book is based on time or on the author’s own consciousness?