The Fall

Summary

The Fall is a short novel in six chapters made up entirely of the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Frenchman living in Amsterdam, who over five days talks to a stranger he meets at a sailors' bar called Mexico City. The listener never speaks in the text; his replies are implied by Clamence's answers. Clamence calls himself a judge-penitent. In the bar, presided over by a silent barman whom Clamence calls a gorilla, he offers to translate for the newcomer and begins to tell his life. Some years earlier he was a successful Paris defense lawyer, specializing in noble causes, widows and orphans, courteous to the blind, generous with alms, admired by colleagues, and pleased above all with himself. He lived, he says, on the heights. Walking through the city in the following days, he compares Amsterdam's concentric canals to the circles of hell and recalls the deportation of the city's Jews during the war. The turning point came one evening on the Pont des Arts in Paris, when, feeling content with his life, he heard a laugh behind him and found no one there. The laugh made him begin to examine himself. He recalls a humiliating quarrel with a motorcyclist at a traffic light in which he failed to strike back, and his pleasure in seducing women he did not love. Finally, on a boat trip on the Zuiderzee, he confesses the memory he had buried: two or three years before the laugh, crossing the Pont Royal after midnight, he passed a young woman in black leaning over the parapet, heard her fall into the Seine and cry out several times, and walked on without turning back or telling anyone. After the laugh he tried to escape judgment by mocking his own virtue, by debauchery and drink, and finally by leaving France. He describes a medieval prison cell called the little-ease, where a man could neither stand nor lie down, and recalls a prison camp in North Africa during the war where fellow prisoners chose him as their pope and he drank a dying comrade's water. In the last chapter, ill with fever in his room, he shows the stranger a stolen panel of Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece, The Just Judges, hidden in his cupboard, and explains his method: he accuses himself at length, so that his listeners recognize themselves in the portrait and he can judge them in turn. He learns that the stranger is himself a Paris lawyer, and closes by imagining that the woman calls him again from the water, saying that it is now too late, fortunately. Gallimard published La Chute in 1956, and Justin O'Brien's English translation appeared the same year. The library holds no text; the novel is under copyright.

Top Lessons

• The good deed that serves the self

  Clamence's Paris life was full of genuine acts of help, yet he discovers that he performed them chiefly to stand above others and enjoy his own image. The novel probes the difference between doing good and wanting to be seen as good.

• The cry not answered

  The woman on the Pont Royal is the buried center of the book. Clamence hears her fall and cries, does not turn, and tells no one; the memory resurfaces only after the laugh on the Pont des Arts.

• Confession as a weapon

  Clamence's penitence is a technique: by accusing himself in general terms, he draws his listener into the same portrait and so becomes his judge. Camus shows how confession can become a new form of pride.

• Judgment and grace

  Clamence says that people cannot wait for the Last Judgment because they judge one another every day, and he speaks of Christ often but rejects the possibility of forgiveness. Camus, an unbeliever, leaves the reader to weigh what Clamence lacks.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medical themes are secondary. The central episode is an unprevented suicide, heard rather than seen. After the laugh on the Pont des Arts Clamence describes palpitations of conscience, sleeplessness, heavy drinking and debauchery as attempts to dull his self-knowledge, and in the last chapter he is confined to bed with fever. Readers have read his condition psychologically as compulsive guilt or narcissism; such readings are interpretive, and Camus frames it in moral and religious terms.

• Chapter 4

  Clamence hears a young woman fall from the Pont Royal into the Seine at night and walks on.

• Chapter 5

  He describes trying to quiet the memory with alcohol and debauchery, and the sense of relief they gave.

• Chapter 6

  Clamence receives the stranger in his room while ill with fever.