Three Questions based on a Reading

For this assignment, you must answer three questions based on the full reading of “Overture” until the end – written by Marcel Proust. I will be putting the questions below. Each question is tied along with a quote, so the question is deprived from the quote it goes with. You must answer the question using the quote and the full reading. Your responses to each question must be very thorough and must incorporate ideas of modernism. Each response should be a paragraph long or a bit shorter — whatever you think answers it very well. The responses must be well-written with no grammar/punctuation mistakes and must answer the full question accurately. The link to access the reading is below.

I’m going to put 4 questions along with its quote — pick THREE to answer. Answer using ideas of modernism and make your response very thorough — formulating good ideas. You do not need to quote from the passage, but you can.

Below are the quotes with its corresponding question — I will put the quote first and its question underneath —

Quote 1- “It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten. It struck me that if I had just scored a victory it was over her; that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in altering her judgment; that this evening opened a new era, must remain a black date in the calendar.” (Overture, p. 24-25)

Question 1: What is the narrator saying in this passage? How has the passage of time changed the narrator’s perception of his mother?

Quote 2: “She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.”

Question 2: How does the narrator perceive his memories when he is having a sensory experience? How does his childhood return to him?

Quote 3 – “As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him that anguish came through Love, to which it is in a sense predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one’s soul before Love has yet entered into one’s life, then it must drift, awaiting Love’s coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or affection for a comrade.”

Question 3: What does the effect of a longer sentence structure do to storytelling? Does it change how you view the narrator?

Quote 4: “The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.” (Overture, p. 23-24)

Question 4: Given that the past is a consistent and ever-present theme in Overture, do you think the narrator’s perception of his past matures over the course of the story? Why or why not?

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7178/7178-h/7178-h.htm#link2H_4_0001 The reading