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Pages 17-41
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Fall, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt and Judgment
Freedom vs. Domination
Egotism
Hypocrisy and Inauthenticity
Judeo-Christianity
Summary
Analysis
The narrator tells the listener that he largely stopped thinking about the laughter after a few days—but he began avoiding the quays and became melancholy. Then he suggests to the listener that they walk around outside. Outside, the narrator points out a house with a sign decorated by Black slaves. He explains that the house must have once belonged to a slave merchant. Then he suggests that while slavery functionally still occurs “at home” and “in factories,” liberal-minded men would now never brag about it.
The laughter permanently affected the narrator’s mood even as he supposedly forgot about it, which suggests that its implied mockery and judgment damaged his all-important ego. Meanwhile, his claim that slavery still occurs “at home” and “in factories” indicates that women are still domestically exploited and working-class people are still economically exploited—but that it’s now considered socially inappropriate to brag about (or potentially even acknowledge) that exploitation. Thus, the narrator cynically argues that society is more hypocritical now than it was when slavery was celebrated—because humanity still allows slavery but now pretends it doesn’t.
Themes
The narrator claims that domination and oppression are completely natural: everyone wants to dominate someone else. Even poor, powerless men dominate women, children, or pets. And domination is necessary because rational dispute never ends—whereas “power,” according to the narrator, “settles everything.” He gives as an example European philosophy, where (he claims) philosophers used to solicit responses from people who might disagree with them but now simply insist on their own rightness and claim that “the police” will back them up in the future.
With his earlier allusions to the Holocaust, the narrator referred to totalitarian political domination as a major social problem. Now he argues that domination is a fundamental human drive of which everyone is guilty: people want power in order to “settle[] everything” and are willing to use “the police” to back up their views if they can rather than live with dispute and uncertainty.
Themes
The narrator claims that slavery is “inevitable” but that it’s better to pretend that it doesn’t exist to protect the happiness of enslaved people and 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 reply, the narrator says that the listener will tell him later—and that his own sign would be “a double face,” while his business card would say “play actor.” He then recalls how he used to tip his hat to the blind people he helped across the street—not for their benefit, but for onlookers.
Here the narrator hints that human beings have begun to hypocritically deny the “inevitable” existence of slavery to protect their own egos—that is, their own sense of moral goodness and innocence—even though all humans are guilty of wanting to dominate others. When he claims that his own accurate shop sign and business card would show a “double face” and call him a “play actor,” he simultaneously acknowledges his own hypocrisy—and casts further doubt on his reliability as a narrator.
Themes
The narrator says that he’s always been an egotistical braggart who secretly believed that he was better than everyone at everything—or, when he wasn’t better, that he could have been if he had tried harder or practiced more. He only ever cared about other people to bolster his ego. He learned these facts about himself slowly, in pieces, after the evening he has mentioned. To learn these facts, he claims, he had to teach himself to remember: he used to forget everything except himself.
Again, the narrator simultaneously judges his own extreme egotism—while implying elsewhere that everyone is just as egotistical and self-involved as he is. Readers may wonder what his motive is for condemning himself so harshly to a near-stranger, the unnamed listener.
Themes
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The narrator starts giving examples of what he learned when he began remembering. He describes a traffic altercation where he exited his car to fight a rude motorcyclist only for an onlooker to punch him in the ear. While he was recovering his wits, the motorcyclist rode off, so he simply got back in his car and drove away. Afterward, he for days fantasized about what he ought to have done instead, for example beating up 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 things”—and that the motorcyclist incident damaged the illusion that he did, in fact, so dominate.
With the anecdote of the traffic altercation, the narrator again uses himself as a negative example of what he has elsewhere argued is a general human tendency: the desire to “dominate in all things.” Furthermore, he suggests that people want to “dominate in all things” simply because such domination protects their egos. Thus, the narrator continues his strategy of judging and condemning all humanity by describing himself in hugely negative terms, implying that these negative terms apply to everyone.
Themes
The narrator adds that this incident also made him realize that he only wanted to defend guilty people when they hadn’t harmed him personally. If someone 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 them highly, his “great love” was himself. He treated his relationships with women like a “game” and acted out little parts to seduce them. For example, he would claim that he was worthless and emotionally unavailable to make the women more interested in him. In response, the women too played parts.
The narrator previously claimed that, prior to the evening of the mysterious laughter, he didn’t understand judges’ profession. Yet afterward, having gained greater self-understanding, he realized that he himself was hugely judgmental if anyone crossed him. In the same vein, he realized that all his romantic relationships ultimately existed in service of his only “great love,” himself, and that as a result his relationships with women were always, deep down, a “game,” a form of hypocritical playacting.
Themes
The narrator claims that though he didn’t love the women with whom he had affairs, he would periodically restart old affairs to assert power over his romantic partners, occasionally even asking them to promise not to have sex with any other men. If they did promise, he felt fine leaving them again. He so habitually behaved like this that eventually he even made conquests of women he wasn’t interested in. He gives as an example an affair he had with an unattractive woman. After he learned she had criticized him to someone else, he made a point of rekindling his romance with her. After he won her over, he then humiliated and abandoned her.
Through describing his own affairs, the narrator again suggests that people want to dominate others out of egotism. In this specific instance, the narrator wanted to dominate his lovers, to assert power over them, in order to prove to himself how much they loved him—that is, to flatter his own ego.
Themes
In response to the listener’s silence, which the narrator interprets as disapproving, the narrator says that perhaps the listener will remember and recount a “similar story” from his own life later. At any rate, when the narrator remembered that affair after forgetting it, he laughed—a laugh like the mysterious laughter he heard on the quays, a laugh that implicated his law career as well as his romances, the former of which he saw as more hypocritical than the latter. Yet in these romances, he never loved but only wanted “to be loved.” In fact, in his ideal world, everyone would love him and live “at his bidding.” In recounting this ideal to the listener, the narrator admits that he feels an odd emotion—perhaps shame.
When the narrator suggests that the listener may tell a “similar story” later, he implies that despite the listener’s disapproving silence, the listener has likely committed similar sins. Thus, the narrator once again implies that his own egotism, hypocrisy, and lust for power are not sins specific to him but are general human failings. Meanwhile, the narrator’s claims that he only wanted “to be loved” and for the whole world to live “at his bidding” again emphasize his egotism and his desire to dominate others, while his shame in recognizing these negative qualities hints that the same egotism that motivates him makes him want to think well of himself morally—something his self-knowledge now prevents.
Themes
The narrator says that he has been feeling this emotion ever since one incident he remembered. Several years before the mysterious laughter, he passed a woman in black on the Pont Royal at night. He had already crossed the bridge when he heard “a body striking the water.” Though he froze, he didn’t turn. Someone called out, their calls traveling down the river. Then there was silence. The narrator, shaking, ordered himself 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 trip across the Zuider Zee to Markan Island the next day. When the listener asks what happened to the woman, the narrator can’t say: he avoided the papers in the days following the incident.
The narrator has been feeling ashamed, the opposite of power and egotism, ever since he failed to save the woman in black from her suicide attempt, an attempt that her cries after her “body st[ruck] the water” implies she quickly regretted. “The fall” in the novel’s title thus refers to the woman’s fall into the water. It also refers to the narrator’s slow fall from innocence after realizing his own lack of power, decisiveness, or morality in a life-or-death situation. Finally, it refers to “the fall of man,” the conventional Judeo-Christian term for humanity’s fall from grace upon gaining knowledge of good and evil and being expelled from the Garden of Eden. The layered allusions in the novel’s title suggest the importance of Judeo-Christian stories to interpreting the novel despite the narrator’s lack of conventional religious belief.
Themes
