A comparison of the treatment of reality and illusion in the novels, "Un Amour De Swann" (Swann's Love), by Marcel Proust, and Andre Gide's "Les Faux-Monnayeurs" (The Counterfeitors).
Abstract This paper is a discussion of how, in both "Un Amour de Swann" and "Les Faux-Monnayeurs," fictional realities are exposed for their illusory nature, and the inner life of characters' fantasy and imagination is shown to be more real than the outer world they inhabit. In both cases, outer reality is shown to be a limited, disappointing, and inherently false area, and the artifice in a fictional reality is highlighted in order to direct our attention to the artifice in our own lived reality. It explains that, while Proust directs readers towards the 'time of our inner lives' as the space of true meaning and experience, Gide believes that action can be taken to expose the falsity inherent in the outer world and emancipate ourselves from the illusions we are enslaved to.
From the Paper "Proust's Un Amour de Swann and Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs are both concerned with the borderline between reality and illusion, and between the inner world of the self and the outer world of physical reality. Both novels contain characters who live in a reality they can neither experience fully, interpret objectively, or escape from, and both novels present a fictional reality exposed for its falsity in order to lead the reader to question the 'sincerity' of his own self and the nature of his own reality."
