Social class is of great importance to the narrator of Swann's Way, and the nuances of class provide one of the major themes of the novel. The narrator attributes this obsession at least in part to his own social class. He is a rich bourgeois who enjoys a similar education and lifestyle to that of the aristocracy, but he remains outside the charmed circle of the Faubourg St Germain.

Swann is from the same social class as the narrator, but he moves in the highest social circles. He is a member of the Jockey Club and a friend of the Guermantes family and the Prince of Wales. The narrator himself later comes to occupy a similar position, a middle-class person who is in high society but not of it. He remarks that this position makes him much more interested in the aristocracy than those who are part of it. The princes and dukes with whom he mixes are proud of their titles because they convey social exclusivity and privilege. They do not have the same romantic appreciation of them as the member of the bourgeoisie, for whom these titles are impossibly distant and glamorous. The mystique remains even when their possessors surround the narrator at the dinner table and prove to be uninteresting people.

Because he grows up in the neighborhood of Guermantes, the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes have a particular fascination for the narrator. He attaches great importance to the connections between titles and the places from which they take their names.