Some of Proust's best writing toward the end of The Prisoner

 The last pages of Proust's volume 5, The Prisoner, bring us back to the kind of writing for which Proust is best known, that is, observations about sensory perception and the effect of certain objects and sensations can release hidden pathways in the brain, leading toward memory and recollection - for ex., the long passage a few pp before the conclusion in which MP wakes in the morning and hears sounds of trams outside his window and detects some of the aromas from the world at work outside of his cloistered room, such as the suds from a washer-woman's tub -all of which remind him of his time at the seashore and his first moments of love for, or actually adoration of, Albertine - and so forth. Toward the end we also get some examples of MP's eccentric or at least unconventional literary criticism, esp his critique of Dostoyevsky that left me wondering whether we read the same novels (Proust would say that we did not). Much of the volume overall, however, concerns his obsession w/ Albertine an din particular his distress at the possibility - the likelihood actually - that she has been engaging in Lesbian relationships even while living w/ Marcel. Why is Marcel/Proust so obsessed with and troubled by these suspicions? A # of possible answers: His own guilt or shame about his own homosexuality? A way to lead the reader to recognize the homosexuality of the narrator (say, to imagine Albertine as Albert, having affairs on the side w/ women)? A way to emphasize the narrator's discomfort w/ Lesbianism and thereby to bolster his masculinity? A way to denigrate Albertine and to highlight her infidelity and duplicity? Finally, Proust on memory: it is a kind of pharmacy of chemical laboratory, where one's hand may fall at any moment a sedative drug or a dangerous poison.