After the close reading our guest did on Thursday I have been thinking about action and passivity.  The narrator, at this point in the book, seems to be a very passive participant in his own life.  He spends much of his time watching others and waiting for others to do what he wants.  When things don’t go as he hopes he is let down and is upset.  However, if he never puts something into action himself how is he going to get the result he expects?  I was particularly stuck on the sentence on page 595 of Within a Budding Grove when the narrator says “My whole plan was wrecked.”  The plan he’s referring to is his plan to look indifferently at pottery and hope that Elstir will introduce him to the little group of girls.  However, he only tells Elstir after the fact how much he’d like to meet them.  I was stuck on his notion that waiting for someone to do what he wanted was a plan.  To me, not doing anything and expecting results is typically not a very effective plan.

The more I thought on his passivity I realized there were two events in Combray where the narrator made a plan and followed through.  The first was when, as a child, he writes to his mother while she’s at dinner to have her come kiss him goodnight.  He even confronts her in the hallway.  His plan works, she even spends the night with him, but he’s miserable.  The second plan he acts on is when he works out a way to visit his old uncle Adolphe without his parents.  He sneaks over to visit his uncle so he can meet some of the beautiful women his uncle hangs out with.  While his uncle seems irritated, it seems as though this plan has worked.  However, the narrator tells his parents what happened.  This causes conflict in the family and uncle Adolphe no longer visits them.

In both instances the narrator made a plan and acted.  In both instances he got the result he wanted.  And in both instances there were negative consequences that overshadowed the victory of enacting his plan.  This may have taught him as a child that action isn’t the best way to go about things.  It makes more sense now that as a teenager the narrator opts for waiting and watching rather than jumping in and doing anything.  I’m interested as the novel progresses to see if the narrator continues to be so passive in his life.