This was my first time reading any of Proust’s works and I started reading feeling a little uncertain about how much I would understand and enjoy the reading. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how well the book flowed and the words were enjoyable to read. For a story that had very little action, it presented many important themes that stood out to me. One of the major themes is the relationship between memory and time. It seemed to me that the main motivation of the novel was exploring the idea that time is not necessarily linear or measured on fixed and unchangeable moments. Instead, time or duration involved the flow of different moments and experiences made an individual point in time indistinguishable from the other. The author tried to express this theme by shifting between dreams and reality. However, I found the constant switch to be confusing and I would have to reread sections to determine whether I was reading his reality or a different dream. This method of writing had me confused at first but the more I read the easier it got for me to follow along.
The story is centred around the narrator’s memories at Combray and his relationship with those memories in the present. What we learned about Marcel’s family was very interesting to me and it created a picture in my mind where I could definitely understand what the family dynamic would have been like. The narrator suffers from nervous ailments and his desire for his mother’s nightly kiss offers him comfort. To me, it seemed that Marcel surrounded all his pain and happiness around his mother. Marcel’s father intimidates him and I sensed some resentment towards his father for trying to keep him from his nightly kiss from his mother. This was an interesting dynamic to me and it expressed a very Oedipal perspective.
Overall I thought this was an excellent book to start the course off. It challenged my ability to follow a difficult text and new stylistic ways of writing that I had not seen in the past. The themes and constant shift from reality to dream made me think about why Marcel was having the reader focus so much on the importance of memories and how they can affect our perception of time. A thought that came to mind a lot while reading was how sleep connects the body and the mind in terms of being physically unconscious and dreaming. A question I had was what was the importance of memories and how can remembering the past affect our present reality?
Hi Spencer, I can relate to the uncertainty that it comes with reading Proust’s text too! The perspective on the transition between dream and reality makes me also question what is actually happening. It’s definitely a difficult task to figure out what is taking place or what is actually going on in the narrator’s mind. Despite my personal challenges, I can definitely agree with you that it was an excellent read!
Hello! I, too, found the shifts between dream and reality to be confusing at times – it made me wonder how much we were supposed to be paying attention to the story vs. the effect of the writing and narration. Like you say, I think the idea is that both time and memory can be messy.