ABSTRACT
Marcel Proust lays down foundations for twentieth-century European literature's exploration of the mind through his focus on memory, perception, and emotion (with its counterpart, intellect), and through his understanding of mental life as hallmarked by discontinuity, multiplicity, and temporality. The ideas on consciousness expressed by Proust's Narrator are far from systematic. Rather, they are revised and developed as the Narrator's experience of life grows, creating a profusion of viewpoints which are not always in harmony, and which receives a fundamental reassessment at the novel's denouement with the Narrator's belated appreciation of an underlying continuity of the self. Proust's version of the mind has little time for non-materialist conceptions of consciousness, and has less in common with Henri Bergson's philosophy of mind than has been suggested. Proust works to present us with the unique experience of a particular consciousness, while at the same time extrapolating general laws which the reader is invited to compare with evidence from their own introspection.
