Reflection. Combray: A Response. Literature & Language Essay

Combray: A Response
Physically incapable, narrator’s experiences in “Combray” are well steeped in work metaphor and imagination. The narrator, alternating between consciousness and sleep, recalls old childhood memories in Combray. Toil is perhaps one most appropriate word to capture a combined state mental oscillation between fading, largely merry, childhood memories and a grim state of physical inability in a single room. Toil identifies, moreover, a spectra of imaginative choices narrator makes and, importantly, intensifies a sense of suffering release from which is achieved only by meditative contemplation of a “madeleine dipped in lemon-blossom tea.” Toil, or perhaps, a metaphor of constant work – mental, emotional and physical – assumes deeper meanings by emphasizing habit as a permeating state of mind and heart all along. Thus, habit, for current purposes, can be said to register or crystallize meanings of work in Combray.
For a narrator, incapacitated in bed, habit, emancipatory and powerful at once, is That skillful but very slow housekeeper who beg...