synopsis:
Delivered as a monologue (confession) addressed by a former top-notch Parisian lawyer to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar, 'the fall' mounts a full-scale assault on upright humanitarians, fashionable free-thinkers and modern man in general, whose epitaph, its protagonist tells us, should read: "‘he fornicated and read the papers".
Widely acclaimed as a charitable, virtuous and irreproachable man, Jean-Baptiste Clamence slowly comes to realise that all his generous acts are motivated solely by the need for power. His sense of his own basic phoniness is confirmed to him when, alone on a bridge one night, he ignores a drowning woman's cries for help. After this he decides to reveal his hollowness to all his admirers; "hurl my duplicity in the face of all those imbeciles, even before they discovered it". Through "pleasant indiscretions" and scandalous debauchery, he ruins his reputation and his health and takes his place among "the lowest of the low".
As its title suggests, 'The Fall' is heavily allegorical. At the height of his career Clamence is "bathed in a light as of Eden"; Amsterdam's concentric canals, he muses, "resemble the circles of hell" (see dante's 'divina comedia'). The metaphysical framework provided by the Bible and Dante's Inferno helps set up Clamence's eventual perverse but persuasive argument: "The more I accuse myself", he says, "the more I have a right to judge you" (his room, in fact, contains a stolen Van Eyck panel depicting several judges). Because he is guilty and knows it, he assumes the role of father-confessor, and his monologue makes it clear that the listener becomes increasingly addicted to his company.
on this book:
The irony of 'the fall' predicts the downfall. Inescapable, it comes in the narrator's intense discovery, in the space of one terrible and unforgettable instant, that no man is innocent and no man therefore is able to judge others from a standpoint of righteousness.strongly influenced by nietzsche, camus describes in this novel the way humans act and think in a nihilistic and a-moral world, in which there is nothing to cling to.see also: * "Then came human beings..."
