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“la petite bande,”
In the second part of Sodom and Gomorrah, however, the narrator returns to Balbec, meets Albertine again and begins to think that he is in love with her.
she was a close associate of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend,
Thus from the beginning his love is grounded in jealousy and a project of control.
we are never allowed to learn of Albertine’s reactions to his behavior toward her:
Can a girl like this really be the sexually rapacious incorrigible liar that the narrator imagines?
As well as a tragedy of possessive love, The Prisoner is also a dreadful comedy of misunderstanding.
is at least double:
he is the (presumably) middle-aged, older-and-wiser character
and also the very young man living through the episode with Albertine:
in his youthful incarnation, he is sometimes presented in a mildly comic light.
The narrator returns into Paris artistic society for a long musical evening at the Verdurins’
the relationship between the Baron de Charlus,
and his protégé Morel, the...
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It is almost as if in this book he is conducting a thought-experiment, trying to imagine what it would be like to have such a being sharing one’s living-space.
Obsession, dependence, revolt, wishful thinking, despair: the whole spectrum of human irrationality is explored
“make a hell in heaven’s despite.”
that the narrator has an intimation, through the music of Vinteuil’s septet, of the possibility of escaping human pettiness and finding a kind of salvation through art.
