Yes, we can indeed say that a deeply personal existential urge underlies Proust’s writing of In Search of Lost Time. The novel is not only a literary masterpiece but also a profound exploration of Proust’s own existential questions and inner struggles. This urge drove him to examine the fundamental aspects of human experience—time, memory, love, desire, loss, and the search for meaning.
Proust’s introspective nature, combined with his experiences of personal loss, illness, and social observation, created an intense need to make sense of life’s transient and often painful nature. The deaths of his parents, his own lifelong health struggles, his sense of isolation, and the sweeping changes of his era all contributed to an acute awareness of life’s fragility and impermanence. This awareness gave him a heightened sensitivity to the passage of time and the fading of memories, themes he grappled with in nearly every page of his work.
In In Search of Lost Time, Proust sought to capture and preserve fleeting moments of experience and emotion, to defy the erasure of time through the permanence of art. His project was, in many ways, existential: he wanted to explore what it means to live, to remember, to love, and ultimately to face the inevitability of mortality. The novel can be seen as Proust’s attempt to find solace, meaning, and continuity amid the transient nature of existence.
Thus, In Search of Lost Time is more than a fictional account of a life—it is a deeply personal quest to confront and understand the human condition. Proust’s existential urge is what drives the novel’s exploration of consciousness and gives it its profound emotional resonance, making it not just a story but a testament to the human experience of time and memory.
