In Search of Lost Time is a compilation of seven volumes of Marcel Proust's personal memoir in which he is concerned with the detailing of memory. He desires to communicate the essence of memory with his readers perfectly so that they may identify the intense beauty of his life. At once consumed with himself and disgusted with his own frailty, Proust struggles throughout his writing to satisfy his own expectation of perfection. He does succeed in expressing his childhood memories, but he can never exactly communicate the pure essence of memory in such as way as the experience of eating a cookie as an adult which he used to enjoy in the summers as a kid accomplished for him. That one moment sparked a lifelong quest to effectively cement memory as a currency of legacy for Proust.
Narrated in seven volumes, the sheer extent of Proust's memoir is formidable. Add to this his complete departure from chronological narrative and traditional plot and the reader finds himself or herself in the midst of an irresistible puzzle. For Proust, the purpose of memory is to be present, so he ignores linearity in his re-telling of the past. To him all -- past, present, future, even more distant past -- are all the same moment of which he desperately must tell. He focuses on the capturing of something essential to his memories, more than feeling, impression, or idea. By enmeshing multiple accounts within one another, Proust manages to speak something to the complexity and mystery of the human recollection.
As a composite memoir, these books trace Proust's memories from early childhood all the way to the moment he decides to write a memoir. There is an implicit unity in the narrative because it adheres to the order of time, of which Proust is decidedly concerned. He dwells upon the inevitability of time as the one distinguishing factor between himself and those petty people of whose company he is subject. As if imbuing him with magical powers, Proust's recognition of temporality allows him to bypass normal polite company in order to indulge aspiration far beyond the limited perspective of his status hungry peers. Nevertheless he is still subject to whims and delusions, of which his story contains plenty.
