In the shadow of young girls, maybe, but Proust's narrator is one of the most isolate characters in literature

If you read no other passage in Marcel Proust's "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower," read the few pages on the "3 trees" that the narrator, M., sees on a carriage ride near Balbec-Plage: he sees these trees and has the odd feeling that they have some kind of deep significance in his life, and then goes on to examine many of the ways in which a visual image can stir us and move us - the best examination I've ever seen of the phenomenon of deja-vu: are the trees something he saw long ago and can no longer recall, something that he saw in a different form now changed, something rising from a dream, he can't quite grasp it - and P. uses some grerat imagery to explain the feeling of a thought lying just beyond our grasp - and has that eerie sensation that these trees are eluding him and then they're past, as the carriage moves on: my one true chance for happiness, he thinks. What a sad character M can be at times. I was actually planning to write a post about how he has essentially no male friends and then - 300 pp in this volume, his one friend from the first volume, Bloch, reappears and a new friend, though a dubious one, St. Loup, is introduced: their presence aside, M, though surrounded by family, by social engagements, and, at least later in the Search for Lost Time, by "young girls," is truly one of the most isolate characters or narrators in literature.