Celia avitia

Close reading for Sam’s seminar

Page 393-394

I decided to do my close reading on pages 393-394, and a little on 213. In search of lost time is based on insecurities and jealousy. In the first book he is obsessed with his mother. Swann and Odette’s relationship depicted in “swann in love”, Swann searched all over for Odette when she wasn’t were she was suppose to be. This Theme is all over the novel and the movie “la captive”.

The narrator left Albertine at home so he can attend the Salon at Mme Verdurin’s. “I wanted to leave, but M. de Charlus having expressed his intentions of going in search of Morel, Brichot detained us.” (393) The narrator is trying to leave but he is talking to M. de Charlus about inviting Morel and Brichot to the party. Morel is Charlus new obsession.

“Moreover, the certainty that when I went home I should find Albertine there, a certainty as absolute as that which I had felt in the afternoon that she would return home from the Trocadero, made me at this moment as little impatient to see her as I had been then”. In this line the narrator is comparing how he feels now to how he felt when Albertine returned home from Trocadero on page 213. On page 213 he is talking about how having a women in the house changes the energy from being negative to positive energy. He even says, “It was the calm that is born of family feeling and domestic bliss”

This page really confuses me because most of the time in this novel he is talking about how he doesn’t love Albertine. On page 394 “I was terrified that she had already conceived a plan to leave me”. So now he is returning to how he really feels. It’s not the “domestic bliss” he was talking about earlier. He doesn’t have a reason to think that she’s hatching this plan; it’s his jealousy messing with him. The next line he says “this suspicion made it all the more necessary for me to prolong our life together until such time as I should have recovered my serenity”. (394) This line shows that he wants to be the one breaking up. He doesn’t want to be caught off guard and be the dumpy.

“Forestalling my plan to break up with her, in order to make her chains seem lighter until I could put my intention into practice without too much pain, the shrewd thing to do”. (394) This quote shows the games that he is playing. He doesn’t want her to break up with him; he talks about how much he misses her back on page 393. “Lighting up her chains” is referring to his obsession with her. He stalks her throw out this volume and he shown in the movie. So he’s going to give her a little bit of freedom so that she will want to stay. He then talks about how he was going to get Albertine to understand that it was his idea to leave her in in the first place.