Marcel
Marcel is the narrator of every volume that comprises the more than 4,000 pages that collectively make up In Search of Lost Time. Not coincidentally, the narrator shares the same first name as the author; Proust’s work is considered the very definition of that type of fiction which is autobiography veiled to various degrees of thinness. Readers of every single word will travel with Marcel from childhood to middle-age and join the ride as he indulges in love affairs, friendships and charting the course through a person of his status and personality navigated societal conventions of the time. Time being, of course, the dominant facet of his recollection of the spatial interplay of societal convention.
Swann
Swann gives his name to what is almost surely the most famous single volume that makes up the whole of the text. Perhaps this is because Swann’s Way commences the exhaustive process of getting to the end and many readers simply never make it much farther past the tale of the wealthy aesthete who quite unhappily attempts to navigate through a society that places far importance on wealth and financial stability that he is able to generate.
The Prince and Princess de Guermantes
The stars of the third volume titled The Guermantes Way are an aristocratic couple whose primary function in the narrative is symbolic. They stand in opposition to the gentrified symbolic of the nouveau riche who dominate Swann’s Way and thus become a metaphor for the changing of the guard from a society built on class with status assigned at birth to the coming economic revolution in which status can be attained by anyone clever enough to work out how to become rich.
Albertine
The second volume entitled Within a Budding Grove introduces a woman who will become of the most important romantic partners of Marcel despite the fact that she is a lesbian. As might be expected given the circumstances and the length of the work, this relationship hardly follows the conventional linear pattern of the typical love affair between the protagonist and character of such import. Suffice to say that the relationship is for Marcel very much something of a “can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em” sort of deal. Nevertheless, there is something in the relationship that seems to indicate Albertine is the closest Marcel will get to finding his soul mate.
M. de Charlus
Referenced as a sexual invert, Charlus is a notorious homosexual and that subject becomes one which dominates the discourse of the fourth volume, Cities of the Plain. He is more often referred to as “the baron” and he becomes a character whom Marcel is—not completely unlike Albertine—both drawn to and repulsed by, though for different reasons. Nevertheless, Charlus also shares with Albertine the inescapable character trait of being endlessly fascinating to Marcel for a variety of reasons.
Marcel's Grandmother
The one person in Marcel’s life that he can be said without question to express the heights of both love and respect toward. She is at home among the old world aristocrats in the book as she is with the up and coming economic set about to displace them. As a result of her high station, Marcel never quite manages to get over her death as he is forced to compare her virtues against those of his friends and lovers; a comparison inevitably found to be lacking on their part which he in his infinite capacity to tailor all narratives into stories about him, forces Marcel to realize the emptiness of his own existence.
