L’ironie proustienne : l’impossibilité de connaître et les projections imaginaires

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze an excerpt from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), the second volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Fundamental to the understanding of the whole novel, the fragment reveals an epistemological observation: everything is fleeting, the essential remains obscure. While the narrator contemplates the changing figures of Albertine, his way of thinking takes an ontological turn, by giving rise to the idea of the mobility of beings and of the self

Keywords

• proustian irony
• mobility of the self
• identity
• otherness