ABSTRACT
The youngest of love’s victims whom Marcel Proust describes in his youth is a sickly boy of about ten years old. He is in love with an older girl for whom he longs terribly in his phantasy. He offers marvellous examples of the torturous relationship between an adolescent and his parents. Proust repeatedly returns to the following theme: either readers hide our oversensitivity by behaving hard and heartlessly towards the one readers love, or else the oversensitive character looks in the partner for the roughness and brutality that he has repressed within himself. For the narrator, illness, adolescence, and sexual maturation go hand in hand. Proust calls the narrator a maniac because of his strange obsessions and his compulsive character. Proust’s narrator is constantly watched. He must abide by his mother’s wishes so that he has no chance or time to develop his own judgemen. The outside world fills in what he ought to feel, how he ought to behave.
