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The Fall
Albert Camus


I saw only superiority on myself, which explained my benevolence and peace of mind.


You are sitting in a bar in Amsterdam- the Mexico City- just after world war, when you chance an encounter with a ordinary being, a simple man popping up on the stage of your life. Jean-Baptiste Clamence comes across to you an ordinary citizen who tells you he used to be a lawyer but he’s now a judge-penitent. A strange kind of emotion provoked in your consciousness due to the announcement about his profession. You don’t know what that means- judge-penitent, but he promises he’ll explain it to you. He narrates in the first person, explaining that you are both from Paris, you’re both in your forties, and you’re both men. Jean- Baptiste Clemence takes you on a journey where he put his real being across you after peeling off layers after layers of his inauthentic personas he has put up to comfort himself against the incising eyes of The Others, however only to warp his being by new ones. You are taken aback by a sudden terror realizing that the man you meet then is actually like you, it’s your own being, in fact he represents all humanity, the universal condition- hollowness of human existence. Welcome to the world of Camus.


I wanted to break up the mannequin that I presented to the world wherever I went, and lay open to scrutiny what was in its belly.


The narrator claims that he once lived a good, self-satisfied life, believing himself a model citizen. However. I was on the right side, and that was enough to ease my conscience. A sense of legality, the satisfaction of being right and the joy of self-esteem: these, my dear sir, are powerful incentives to keep us on our feet and moving forward. Clamence, in his position as judge-penitent, embodies the human necessity to judge, and need to condemn. The innate desire of human beings to judge acts as the very source of false morality. He creates a sort of illusion around himself based on the self-appeasing traits, however the spell, created by these ‘traits�, shattered to nothingness during one night when is walking by Seine, observes a that woman flings herself from the river bank and to certain death. He is standing right there listening on the cries of the woman but he couldn’t move to help her. Her fall triggers Clamence’s own. In another incident, Clamence finds that he is trapped behind a motorcycle which has stalled ahead of him and is unable to proceed once the light changes to green as a result. Other cars behind him start honking their horns, and Clamence politely asks the man several times if he would please move his motorcycle off the road so that others can drive around him; however, with each repetition of the request, the motorcyclist becomes increasingly agitated and threatens Clamence with physical violence. , Clamence, utterly humiliated, merely returns to his car and drives away. Later, he runs through his mind "a hundred times" what he thinks he should have done � namely strike his interlocutor, then chase after the motorcyclist and run him off the road. After having been struck in public without reacting, it was no longer possible for me to cherish that fine picture of myself. If I had been the friend of truth and intelligence I claimed to be, what would that episode have mattered to me? It was already forgotten by those who had witnessed it. For Clamence, the collision of his true self with his inflated self-image, and the final realization of his own hypocrisy becomes painfully obvious. Awakened to the reality of both his own, and the whole of humanity’s guilt, Clamence retreats from his settled life build around seemingly false self-placating characteristics and chooses rather to spend his days recounting his story in the hope that others will be awakened as he has been, and in so being alleviate the burden he himself carries. Clamence takes to this misanthropic life with ease, declaring himself a “judge-penitent�, both condemned and condemning.


The face of morality represented by Clamence, actually turns out to be an illusion of morality, a morality doesn’t build around integrity instead around false notions of righteousness. However, the narrative props up an underlining truth that the false veneer which Clamence wraps around his being takes birth out of necessity to live a seemingly virtuous life- in the eyes of The Other. But it leads to an inauthentic, hollow existence which permeates from the straightforward narrative of the book but shows you hypocrisy of your existence itself. And your whole existence shudders with inexplicable terror while reflecting upon the hollowness of your very being. The self-loathing aroused from it makes you realize that your whole existence is a catalogue of guilt, hypocrisy and alienation as the morality, you build your life upon, ripped apart on the encounter with harsh realities of existence. The fall which Clamence experiences is not just his fall, it’s the fall of whole humanity as your whole history of existence is built around such false, self- assuaging norms, otherwise hollow in its core. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. While acknowledging that isolation is the only way to begin to free oneself of the expectations of others and avoid Sartre’s Bad Faith, Clamence preaches slavery � the abdication of freedom � as the only way to be happy. As Sartre used to say � we are condemned to free. It is one of his many diabolic. I'm well aware of the fact one cannot do without being dominating or being served. Every man needs slaves just as he needs fresh air. Giving orders is like breathing, you must agree? In a world of only relative morality, authority, Clamence seems to suggest, is the only root to objective truth. But if you question it on the ontological level, you find that this assertion is undercut by Clamence’s own attempt to elevate himself to the position of judge, wherein you find a logical inconsistency as humanity attempts to judge itself without transcendent being.

The main thing is to able to let oneself do anything, while from time to time loudly declaring one’s own unworthiness. I allow myself everything, once again and this time without laughing. I haven’t changed my way of life: I still love myself and I still use other people. It’s just that confessing my sins permits me to start again with a lighter heart and to gratify myself twice, firstly enjoying my nature, and then a delicious repentance.



And you find that world of Clemence is no different that of Mersault, for he faces the problems of anonymity and indifference in modern life, only to expose the absurd nature of life wherein human beings tend to find meaning of life and totally unable to find any. As a character, Clamence epitomises the selfishness that stands between man and authentic experience, and true morality for community not just self. Only a novice would say that Clamence is Camus’s own voice- naively tracing the biographical elements in the books, however, the character of Clemence represents the reflection of a modern man living in post war. The nihilistic feeling he feels on encountering the absurdness of life urge him to take the easy way out- to fall back, only on new false notions. His inability to live between the evil and the righteousness- in the absurd state of life- creates a false morality. Clamence experiences Kierkegaard’s Dread. By choosing to embrace a life of judgement, he becomes a fallen prophet.



The narrator would take you through the ‘bourgeois hell� of Amsterdam by his monologue about guilt, hypocrisy and alienation. He ensnares us in his world of mirrors and deceptions, conveying the universality of his message while at the same time offering enough precision of detail for us to be aware of references to explicit events and personalities even we do not know what and who these are. Sartre once called it� the finest and the least well-understood� of Camus’s works. The observation by Sartre was bang on since the multi-layered text of this highly allusive book creates a chilling atmosphere behind its simple language and straightforward narrative. Though the divergence of Sartre’s and Camus’s thinking has become evident much earlier but Sartre’s review of The Rebel made it one of most celibrated literary battles of 20th century. One would assume, perhaps appropriately, that the novel was written, at least in parts, to express Camus’s feelings about the quarrel with Left (as Sartre had been champion of Marxism) however the novel appears to have references to ideas of Sartrean Existentialism. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre had posited a world in which human individuals are totally free, but in a constant struggle to defend their freedom against the encroachment of others who will attempt to dominate, limit and constrain them. These attempts can take the form of open oppression or more subtly, of love and affection, emotions that Sartrean Existentialist are imbued with bad faith- bad faith of the kind that Clemence seems to be describing when he talks about his discovery that ‘modesty helped me to shine, humility to triumph and virtue to oppress�. Observed with judgment and enslavement, Clamence is an Existentialist, too, in the anguish that comes with his understanding of the human condition and its absurdity. One may find Clamence to be satirical portrait of Sartre, something seems undeniable given the circumstances in which the novel was written, some may even hind that Clamence as a portrait of Camus himself as even some of the reviewers reverberate the same. Perhaps he has traits of both. The confession of the ‘judge-penitent� may be in reality an accusation. In that case, it leads right back to Existentialism, it could be traced out in Camus’s notebook which reads: ‘Existentialism. What they accuse themselves, one can be sure that it is always in order to condemn others. Judge- penitents.�


I didn’t know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. Nor is it a gift, a box of delicacies which will make your mouth water. Oh no! On the contrary, it’s hard gift and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. No champagne, no friends raising their glasses and looking affectionately at you. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you have a temperature or you are grieving or you lose nobody.


I am the end and the beginning, I announce the law. In short, I am a judge-penitent.



It's one of those books which require you to actively ponder upon what the author has to say beneath its straightforward narrative. And you'd be amazed to see its profound effect on multiple readings. If you're willing to stretch yourself beside the conventional demands of a book, Camus's universe is for you.

5/5