Retour à Reims (Fragments) plot
Social advancement is virtually impossible in the rigid class society that France essentially still is. But the narrator in Returning to Reims (Fragments), himself a working-class child, manages to wrestle himself from his fate - working in a factory as a thirteen-year-old, living in drab tenements, suffering from illiteracy and alcoholism and dying prematurely. He flees from where he grew up and only returns after the death of his father, whom he hates. It is only when his mother starts talking about her life that he realizes how much his father was shaped by his environment and circumstances.