This book comprises Volumes 5 (The Captive) and 6 (The Fugitive) of In Search of Lost Time. In these two volumes, we go through an important period of the narrator’s life as he steps into his adulthood from the impressionable adolescence. Thematically, the volumes center on love, desire, physical intimacies, and mental attachment.
In The Captive, we see our narrator embracing the first feelings of love and desire. He enters into a relationship with a girl named Albertine, and lives with her in his mother’s apartment. He basks himself in a blissful world of pleasures at first. But consumed by possesive obsession and suspicion, his romantic relationship with Albertine slowly becomes an intense torment to him. Throughout the story, we see the narrator, possessed with jealousy and suspicion, acting like a neurotic. He suspects Albertine of immoral behaviour with women, and works himself to a frenzy by questioning her and employing other methods to ascertain the truth. As a result, his health suffers and his relationship with Albertine rupturs.
The interesting question here is who the “Captive” is – Albertine or the narrator? In a physical sense, one could state that it’s Albertine who is the captive since her every movement is watched and scrutinized, curtailing her personal freedom. But in an emotional and a much stronger sense, it is the narrator who is the captive. His obssesion that gives rise to constant jealous pangs and his suspicions that leads to overthinking and overanalyzing makes him a prisoner of his own senses.
In The Fugitive, the narrator learns of the death of Albertine following her departure. This effectively annihilates any future attempt at reconciliation. The narrator sinks in guilt and grief which he tries to soften with philosophising his feelings. To his surprise, he realizes that he hasn’t truly loved Albertine;he has only loved a woman of his own creation and imagination.
Here, the idea of “Fugitive” is twofold. On the one hand, it means the narrator’s escape from captivity, his release from the emotional chains that bound him. On the other hand, fugitive means the fleeting nature of one’s feelings. At one point, the narrator was obsessed with his love for Albertine. But with time, he falls out of love. When they part and she dies, his love rekindles in the guise of guilt and grief. However, when he realises that he has loved only a woman of his own imagination and not the woman he had lived in flesh and blood, his emotional ties with Albertine severs, reducing her status in his heart to only a memory. With time, even that memory fleets.
The two volumes The Captive/The Fugitive deviate from the previous volumes of In Search of Lost Timewith the story’s focal concentration on the narrator. However, towards the end of The Fugitive, we meet some of the old characters and learn surprising new developments, furnishing an incentive to read the final volume.
Proust’s writing is always the key attraction of In Search of Lost Time. The emotional journey of narrator’s falling in and out of love, his grief at loosing her and his recovery is written in a manner that is hauntingly beautiful. Even when one is exasperated at the narrator’s conduct, when one is tired at listening to his long winding philosophising about love and loss, one can still indulge in the luxury of his words and be comforted.
Rating: 4/5
