Lessons from "The Fall"

Camus paints the image of all and no one.

The Fall by Albert Camus is emerging as one of my top books of the year.

I read the first half of The Fall in a bit of a daze; the second-person monologue style was novel at first, but quickly became tiresome. The setting of 20th century Amsterdam was interesting but I found the narrator off putting. I took a break, cruised through the dark humor and morbid truths of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and jumped back into The Fall with the excitement of someone beginning to unload the top of the dishwasher after having exhausted all his motivation on the bottom rack. Even tonight, coming upon the end of the book I found myself checking how many pages I had remaining. With less than twenty pages left, I reasoned I had better push through to the ending so that I could jump into something more entertaining.

With ten pages to go, however, something clicked.

At last, I felt the narrator speaking directly to me. The parts of the narrator I disliked had been summed up, in total: his vanity; his arrogance; his false, performed virtues. All had been openly confessed and expounded upon as the narrator explained to the reader that he was, in his speeches of the preceding hundred pages, acting the role of a judge-penitent. The preceding pages of his frank admissions of sin made him the penitent, and in the final pages he changes into the role of the judge. At first, you imagine him to be judging “you” as the person in the story. As he continues, the reality that he is judging you, the reader, sinks in: “I lie in wait particularly for the bourgeois, and the straying bourgeois at that,” Camus wrote. “It’s with him that I get my best results.” At that line, I realized Camus had sprung his trap.

Camus slowly crafts a portrait of experiences and features that can’t help but look familiar. Anecdotes, painted with small brushstrokes in painstaking detail, begin to rhyme with something in your mind as the narrator describes his life, his sinfulness, and his despicable nature. You can’t quite place it, but you know you are aware of something related to what he describes. The finishing stroke of the portrait forms “the image of all and no one.” The narrator sadly declares the sorry figured depicted to be himself. You slowly realize, however, a glint in the canvas; it is not a painting, but a mirror.

In professing the universal misery within himself to the reader, the narrator transforms himself into the most exalted from the most wretched. He is no different from before. He has all of the same vices and shortcomings. He is generous to be noticed and helpful to be thanked: a sneak, play actor, hypocrite. But his confessional approach allows him speed over those who would judge him, for he is the one to “announce the law” for the judges to arbitrate. “The more I accuse myself,” Camus notes sardonically, “the more I have a right to judge you.”

I guess in writing this note, that’s what I’m doing now: “practice the profession of penitent to be able to end up as a judge.” I’m likely guilty of the same sins of character and action as the narrator, and so are you. Maybe it takes the preceding hundred pages to fully paint the portrait, but perhaps this canvas is starting to look at bit reflective. If so, sorry!

“It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!”