| Summary: | <p>This study investigates the different manifestations of self-justification in <em>A la recherche du temps perdu</em>. Proust's novel is, famously, at once fictional and autobiographical. Written in the first person, it proposes a retrospective and confessional narrative mode as its working medium, in the manner of Saint Augustine's or Rousseau's <em>Confessions</em>. It is a novel fascinated by how judgement takes place. Using the 1987-89 Pléiade edition of the text, Brunet's concordance, <em>Le Vocabulaire de Proust</em>, and the electronic concordancing capacities of FRANTEXT (both based on the previous 1954 Pléiade edition), this study is based on close textual reading, paying particular attention to under-examined sections of <em>A la recherche</em>. It discovers a phenomenology of Proustian self-justification. The thesis divides into three parts. Part One focuses on the narrator's relation to an external world perceived as hostile. Chapter I shows self-justification as assimilation: attempts by the narrator to fit into aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain society. Part Two concentrates on rhetoric, metaphor and characterization. Chapter II argues that the rhetorical trope of digression offers elastic possibilities for self-justificatory evasiveness, defeated by narrative progression. Chapter III argues that the figure of the <em>cloison</em>, or permeable partition, marks moments of self-justificatory dependence on dwindling protective props, used to fend off unwanted knowledge. Chapter IV shows that self-justification as discrimination informs Proustian characterization. Part Three (Chapter V) assesses the limits of self-justification. It reads the opening of <em>Albertine disparue</em>, and argues that mourning is a process justifying loss to the self. In conclusion, I argue that, while self-justification as a mode of interaction with the world produces finely-tuned responses, it may also produce untrustworthy moral choices. Moral and psychological experimentation in self-justification is a vital component of Proust's narrative engine.</p>
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