At the beginning of my reading of Swann’s Way, when I first started to hear of M. Swann, I was intrigued. He was mysterious and unorthodox, straying away from high society with such care that almost nobody knew that he was living multiple lives. In actuality, this type of person and this type of lifestyle is not all that uncommon (at least in my experience) but it was the way that we heard about M. Swann through the eyes and ears of the narrator that made him more interesting to me that other people that I have read about and met in the two decades of my existence. It was wonderful hearing about him through the inaccurate conversation held by the narrators family and by the narrators own recollections and assumptions but when the novel transitioned into Swann In Love and we began to see more detail about M. Swann’s life I have to admit that I was disappointed. Not in the novel, but in M. Swann himself.

M. Swann doesn’t appear to be honest with himself in really any aspect. Maybe this is because it’s not really told through his point of view or maybe that is just how people acted in Parisian society of that time but M. Swann does not appear to be this unconventional man that we had been told he was. Instead, M. Swann appears to be no better than his high class associates and possibly even worse. I say this because while the high class of Paris that we are told about in the novel appear to be rather manipulative and impersonal at least they are being this way to each other and are aware of the intricate details of high class social politics. M. Swann, on the other hand, is acting this way towards everybody that he finds interest in, most of whom are of a lower class than his own. It seems poor of his character to interact with people this way because, as it appears to me, M. Swann is not separating himself from high society because he actually enjoys the company of middle and low class citizens but because he can get more of what he wants from them and with far less accountability.