 Accordingly, it is possible to project out of the "Search" itself a series of putative and intermittent authors...The portraitist of an expiring society, the artist of romantic reminiscence, the narrator of the laminated "I," the classicist of formal structure—all these figures are to be found in Proust...The role of memory is central to the novel, introduced with the famous madeleine episode in the first section of the novel and in the last volume, "Time Regained", a flashback similar to that caused by the madeleine is the beginning of the resolution of the story.