“All love affairs fail, and fail in the same way. All journey’s end in disappointment. All satisfactions are too little and too late. Death picks off the narrators admired mentors one by one, rekindling and reinforcing his childhood feelings of abandonment.” Proust Among the Stars Pg.7 of the Preface

This comes from the book written by Malcolm Bowie. He correctly identifies each of Marcel’s relationships. Marcel yearns for each one of the characters in different ways. He yearns for his mother’s affection, the attention of Mme de Villeparisis, the band of girls, Gilberte, Albertine, etc. He suffers from the incapacity to experience happiness. He is ultimately obsessive in each of his relationships. He isolates himself to make himself suffer by making impossible demands- similarly to other characters in his book such as does Swann, the Narrator, and Charlus.

We watch as Swann makes impossible demands of Odette, obsessing over her relationships with other men. Such as the night he believed she was cheating on him with someone else because she told him not to come over because she didn’t feel well. He watched outside what he thought to be her window, seeing lights and light talking. He comes to find he was looking in the wrong window all along.

Marcel is infatuated with Albertine but he is too obsessed over her being with another woman. He spends all his time discovering if she really is interested in women, driving each other both to the ends of hysterics.

Proust reaches a conclusion- while it is depressing, it does express his thoughts clearly-

“The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”