Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Tale for the Time Being, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time, Impermanence, and the Present
The Difficulty of Communication
Life vs. Death
Coincidences and Connections
Sexual Perversion and Violence
Summary
Analysis
In an excerpt from Le temps retrouvé, Marcel Proust compares books to a large cemetery where the names on the tombs aren’t discernible. Sometimes, one remembers the names, but one cannot tell if anything about the person who existed survives in the book’s pages.
Proust’s excerpt brings up the idea that characters in books are open to the reader’s interpretation—they aren’t static. Names and personalities are forgotten, and they eventually live in the reader’s memory. Similarly, Ruth’s version of events in Nao’s story is the only one that matters, whether or not the real Nao actually lived as Ruth recalls.
Themes
