Includes bibliographical references (pages 157-160).
Contents:
Family matters -- To be or not to be a Jew? -- Forbidden love -- A comprehensive moral accounting? -- The Arabian nights -- The narrator -- Time and death -- Memory -- Concluding remarks and some more.
Summary:
"An award-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. In this engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time, Saul Friedländer 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. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author's position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author's life doesn't give obvious answers. The narrator's reflections on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to the image of self that he projects. In Proustian Uncertainties, Friedländer draws on his personal experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.