Proustian Uncertainties

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian revisits Marcel Proust's masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity--that of the novel's narrator and Proust's own.This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. Why the difference? We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did.

Does this reflect the author's position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author's life doesn't give obvious answers.