Espace fermé, espace ouvert : Proust à la recherche du familier

The limited space of the room acquires particular values ​​in Proust. The work In Search of Lost Time is built on numerous oppositions which are expressed among other things at the level of space: also, the novelist reveals how the room can be either threatening or welcoming, depending on the imagination invested in it. This is how the child narrator's bedroom, benevolent, can become a torture when night falls and he must find himself alone, and the hotel room, threatening and disturbing, can turn into a quiet and reassuring space. thanks to the intervention of the female character, namely the grandmother. The duality of the two sides, familiar and foreign, contains an antithesis but also a complementarity which proves fundamental in the initiation and experience of the future writer.