The Listener Character Analysis in The Fall

The listener, whom the reader learns about only through comments of the unreliable, sometimes deceitful narrator, is a middle-aged lawyer from Paris whom the narrator identifies as an “open-minded[]” and “cultured bourgeois.” While on a trip to Amsterdam, he meets the narrator in a red-light district bar called Mexico City, and they strike up a provisional friendship. Over the course of several days, the narrator slowly reveals to the listener how he had an existential crisis, gave up his own law career in Paris, and moved to Amsterdam to become a “judge-penitent,” someone who engages in self-aware self-condemnation to manipulate others into agonized confessions and thereby feel superior to them. Ultimately, the narrator reveals that he has been trying to manipulate the listener into just such an agonized confession—but as readers only have access to the narrator’s side of the conversation, not the listener’s, it is ultimately unknown whether the listener does confess. As the novel consists in the narrator’s remarks to the listener, the listener functions as something of a stand-in for the audience: he hears what readers hear and is manipulated by the unreliable narrator as readers are manipulated.

The Listener Quotes in The Fall

The The Fall quotes below are all either spoken by The Listener or refer to The Listener. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

Anyone who has considerably meditated on man, by profession or vocation, is led to feel nostalgia for the primates. They at least don’t have any ulterior motives.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener, The Bartender

Page Number and Citation: 4

Explanation and Analysis:

Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell?

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 14

Explanation and Analysis:

Of course, I didn’t tell you my real name.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 17

Explanation and Analysis:

The feeling of the law, the satisfaction of being right, the joy of self-esteem, cher monsieur, are powerful incentives for keeping us upright or keeping us moving forward.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 18–19

Explanation and Analysis:

A very Christian friend of mine admitted that one’s initial feeling on seeing a beggar approach one’s house is unpleasant. Well, with me it was worse: I used to exult.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 21

Explanation and Analysis:

Even in the details of daily life, I needed to feel above. I preferred the bus to the subway, open carriages to taxis, terraces to closed-in places.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 23

Explanation and Analysis:

That’s the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener, The Woman in Black

Page Number and Citation: 33–34

Explanation and Analysis:

Power, on the other hand, settles everything. It took time, but we finally realized that. For instance, you must have noticed that our old Europe at last philosophizes in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: “This is the way I think. What are your objections?” For the dialogue we have substituted the communiqué: “This is the truth,” we say. “You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right.”

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 45

Explanation and Analysis:

You, for instance, mon cher compatriote, stop and think of what your sign would be. You are silent? Well, you’ll tell me later on. I know mine in any case: a double face, a charming Janus, and above it the motto of the house: “Don’t rely on it.”

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 47

Explanation and Analysis:

Oh, I don’t know. Really, I don’t know. The next day, and the days following, I didn’t read the papers.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener, The Woman in Black

Page Number and Citation: 71

Explanation and Analysis:

I have no more friends; I have nothing but accomplices. To make up for this, their number has increased; they are the whole human race. And within the human race, you first of all. Whoever is at hand is always the first.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 73

Explanation and Analysis:

To be sure, I knew my failings and regretted them. Yet I continued to forget them with a rather meritorious obstinacy. The prosecution of others, on the contrary, went on constantly in my heart. Of course—does that shock you? Maybe you think it’s not logical? But the question is not to remain logical. The question is to slip through and, above all—yes, above all, the question is to elude judgment.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 76

Explanation and Analysis:

As I told you, it’s a matter of dodging judgment. Since it is hard to dodge it, tricky to get one’s nature simultaneously admired and excused, they all strive to be rich. Why? Did you ever ask yourself? For power, of course. But especially because wealth shields from immediate judgment, takes you out of the subway crowd to enclose you in a chromium-plated automobile, isolates you in huge protected lawns, Pullmans, first-class cabins.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 82

Explanation and Analysis:

Then I realized, as a result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to sin, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 84

Explanation and Analysis:

I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where lies the bitter water of my baptism.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener, The Woman in Black

Page Number and Citation: 108

Explanation and Analysis:

I had to submit and admit my guilt. I had to live in the little-ease. To be sure, you are not familiar with that dungeon-cell that was called the little-ease in the Middle Ages. In general, one was forgotten there for life. That cell was distinguished from others by ingenious dimensions. It was not high enough to stand up in nor yet wide enough to lie down in.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener, The Woman in Black

Related Symbols: The Little-Ease

Page Number and Citation: 109

Explanation and Analysis:

Justice being definitively separated from innocence—the latter on the cross and the former in the cupboard—I have the way clear to work according to my convictions.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Related Symbols: The Painting

Page Number and Citation: 130

Explanation and Analysis:

Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner’s box before the judges, and alone to decide in the face of oneself or in the face of others’ judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that’s why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you’re down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener

Page Number and Citation: 133

Explanation and Analysis:

Brr . . . ! The water’s so cold! But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Listener, The Woman in Black

Page Number and Citation: 147

Explanation and Analysis:

The Listener Character Timeline in The Fall

The timeline below shows where the character The Listener appears in The Fall. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

The narrator, speaking to a listener whom he calls “monsieur,” offers to order a gin on behalf of the listener from... (full context)

The narrator says he himself is very inclined to make friends. He accepts the listener’s invitation to have another drink and asks how long the listener will stay in Amsterdam.... (full context)

The bartender brings the narrator and listener gin. The narrator explains that the bartender only called him “doctor” because the Dutch call... (full context)

The narrator encourages the listener to judge him by his appearance, pointing to his own ragged coat but neat fingernails.... (full context)

When the listener indicates that he’s leaving, the narrator offers to walk him back to his hotel, located... (full context)

...their doubleness: they are businesspeople who live in an Indonesian dream world. He asks the listener whether he’s ever remarked that the “concentric canals” of Amsterdam resemble Dante’s nine circles of... (full context)

At a later meeting, the narrator says that he can tell the listener what a “judge-penitent” is, but he’ll have to explain a few other facts first. He... (full context)

The narrator insists to the listener that his life back then was basically perfect, occasionally hedonistic, and socially satisfying. Though a... (full context)

...mentioned. The narrator calls the bartender for another drink and admits that he wants his listener to give him “understanding,” even as he thinks that understanding is a far shallower emotion... (full context)

When the listener asks the narrator about the “evening” he mentioned earlier, the narrator encourages the listener to... (full context)

...Despite the concierge’s nastiness, the narrator went to his funeral. He asks, rhetorically, whether the listener can explain this decision. Additionally, the concierge’s wife, who mourned her husband theatrically and spent... (full context)

Abruptly, the narrator promises to meet up with the listener the next day. Now, however, he has to go give legal advice to a murderous... (full context)

The narrator tells the listener that he largely stopped thinking about the laughter after a few days—but he began avoiding... (full context)

...the self-esteem of enslavers. Hence, people should hide their too-accurate shop-signs. He then asks the listener to imagine what the listener’s shop-sign would look like if accurate. When the listener doesn’t... (full context)

...his assailant, driving after the motorcyclist, and beating the motorcyclist up too. He tells the listener that remembering this event made him understand that he had wanted “to dominate in all... (full context)

...did harm him, he became a harsh, unforgiving judge. He goes on to tell the listener about his love life, claiming that though he had many affairs with women and esteemed... (full context)

In response to the listener’s silence, which the narrator interprets as disapproving, the narrator says that perhaps the listener will... (full context)

...to act speedily yet didn’t. Afterward, he left, telling no one. The narrator and his listener reach the narrator’s house, and the narrator promises to meet the listener for a boat... (full context)

The narrator praises the “quaintness” of the village on Markan Island but tells the listener that he plans to reveal more than mere quaintness. After praising the gray, featureless landscape,... (full context)

The narrator warns the listener not to believe anyone who asks him to be honest with them—they don’t want honesty... (full context)

In response to something the listener says about “patience,” the narrator agrees that patience is required to await the Last Judgment—but... (full context)

...his lies, lest the truth die with him. As an aside, he claims to the listener that by contrast, he now loves the idea of the truth dying with him—for example,... (full context)

The narrator tells the listener that while he tried to tell himself that “Salvation” (i.e., annihilation) would come with death,... (full context)

...achieve innocence. He didn’t hit upon the right method until later. Then he tells the listener he must explain about “debauchery” and “the little-ease” before finally revealing the meaning of “judge-penitent.” (full context)

The narrator tells the listener that their boat is speeding along—it only appears motionless because, on the foggy Zuider Zee,... (full context)

The narrator tells the listener that at this moment, he realized he could not avoid his fate: he would spend... (full context)

As their boat comes ashore, the narrator invites the listener to accompany him home so he can finish talking. Then he asks the listener whether... (full context)

The narrator notes that he and the listener have reached his home. While taking his leave, he claims that he is a godless... (full context)

When the listener arrives at the narrator’s home, the narrator explains that he’s in bed due to a... (full context)

Apparently at the listener’s urging, the narrator begins explaining how he came to be pope of a prison camp.... (full context)

...also because one can thereby make oneself superior to the pope. Then, after asking the listener to check that the door is closed, the narrator instructs him to open a cupboard... (full context)

When the listener asks why the narrator never returned the painting, the narrator retorts that the bartender has... (full context)

...narrator announces that he finally will explain what a judge-penitent is. First, he asks the listener to lock the painting of the judges back in the cupboard. Then he explains that... (full context)

The listener laughs when the narrator admits he’s looking forward to the listener’s “confession.” In response, the... (full context)

The narrator invites the listener to come to the Mexico City that evening and watch the narrator work. Each time... (full context)

The narrator returns to his bed, asking the listener to “forgive” him. He admits that he became overemotional and that while his interim plan... (full context)

When the listener admits that he is not a policeman but a lawyer, the narrator cries out that... (full context)