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Pages 42-71
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 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, he says that the clouds the listener notices in the sky are actually flocks of doves. Then he asks whether the listener understands him and says he no longer has the clarity of speech his friends used to admire. Immediately thereafter, he corrects himself for saying “friends,” claiming he only has “accomplices”—but his accomplices consist of all humankind, especially the listener.
When the narrator claims he has no “friends,” only “accomplices,” he implicitly casts himself as a criminal whose crime everyone is implicated in. With this metaphor, the narrator continues his habit of condemning himself while implying that everything he condemns himself for is also true of all other human beings—who, by extension, ought to be condemning themselves as well.
Themes
The narrator claims that he knows he has no friends because when he considered dying by suicide to “punish” them, he realized “no one would feel punished.” Besides, it’s pointless to die by suicide, because one can’t witness others’ shock and guilt at one’s death—and most people one leaves behind don’t actually suffer long from one’s death anyway. Additionally, people will attribute “idiotic or vulgar motives” to the dead person. And finally, the narrator admits that he’s too egotistical for suicide.
The narrator’s desire to “punish” his friends hints at his judgmental and vindictive attitude toward others, an attitude that may make readers question his apparently friendly relationship with the listener. Meanwhile, the narrator dismisses suicide for entirely egotistical reasons: one can’t enjoy other people’s pain at one’s death and one will be misunderstood as “idiotic or vulgar” afterward. Thus, the narrator once again displays simultaneous self-hatred and general misanthropy even as he buddies up to the listener.
Themes
As an example of his egotism, the narrator admits that even after he remembered his own faults, he tried to forget them while continuing to judge others harshly. The purpose of this double-step was “to elude judgment,” a hugely difficult proposition given how judgmental absolutely everyone is. He compares his former self to an “animal tamer” who walks into work with a bloody cut, knowing that the animals will attack him. He began to suspect that his friends, who used to seem so deferential, were judging him and laughing at him. In his hypersensitive state, he realized that he had “enemies” who hated him for having failed to share his previous luck with them; once he realized people hated him, he felt that the entire world was laughing at him.
The narrator’s story suggests that while people are egotistical, they also ultimately realize that they have faults—that they are guilty of something and thus liable to judgment. The combination of their egotism and this ego-bruising revelation of guilt makes them desperate “to elude judgment” from others—which leads people to hypocritically judge others while trying to forget, ignore, or hide their own faults.
Themes
The narrator argues that people judge others to avoid being judged. All people see themselves as “innocent.” Men love to hear that they are naturally virtuous. They don’t like others to praise them for their hard work at becoming virtuous, even though being naturally virtuous isn’t praiseworthy. Criminals, meanwhile, love to hear that their crimes resulted from their circumstances rather than their characters, even though they are no more responsible for their characters than their circumstances. Everyone just wants “irresponsibility” and innocence, that’s all. That’s one reason people want to be rich—they can use their wealth to “isolate[]” themselves socially and so temporarily avoid others’ judgment.
Here the narrator implies that people want to see themselves as “innocent,” even though innocence and natural virtue don’t derive from one’s own efforts and so aren’t really praiseworthy. People want to believe themselves innocent, the narrator suggests, because they are intensely afraid of being held responsible for their own actions. They desire domination—including the social domination that comes from wealth—so that they can “isolate[]” themselves from the judgment of others, which they fear more than anything. That is to say, people would rather be innocent than hardworking, admirable, or genuinely good—and indeed, they are willing to hoard wealth and oppress others to illicitly avoid just judgment.
Themes
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The narrator warns the listener not to believe anyone who asks him to be honest with them—they don’t want honesty but only to believe more deeply in flattering lies. People’s desire to avoid judgment means they rarely reveal themselves to their superiors in character. Instead, they reveal themselves to others like them, expecting sympathy and reassurance rather than any encouragement to improve their characters. The narrator asks whether the listener knows Dante. When the listener says he does, the narrator mentions that Dante placed the angels who failed to take sides between God and Satan in Limbo and claims that that’s where people find themselves—in Limbo.
Once again, the narrator uses his self-condemnation as a springboard to judge everyone, trying to convince the listener that people really want dishonesty, flattery, and comfort even when they ask for honesty. Meanwhile, his repeated allusions to Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–c. 1321) and Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1321), an epic poem about the Christian afterlife, emphasize the centrality of Judeo-Christian stories to his worldview despite his lack of religious belief. In Catholicism specifically, “Limbo” refers to an area in the afterlife for those who died in a state of original sin but who don’t deserve to go to Hell proper. When the narrator says that people generally find themselves in Limbo, he suggests that people are inherently sinful but often fail to make any choices really good or bad enough to distinguish themselves.
Themes
In response to something the listener says about “patience,” the narrator agrees that patience is required to await the Last Judgment—but everyone is impatient, including him, which is why he became a “judge-penitent.” Yet before he could do so, he had to go on a journey of self-discovery, confront the laughter, and realize his own internal complexity. He discovered that he was leveraging all his apparently good qualities to self-interested, egotistical ends. For example, he used to keep humbly quiet about his birthday so he could wallow when people forgot it.
In Christian theology, the Last Judgment refers to God’s final judgment on human souls at the end of the world. When the narrator says that people are too impatient to wait for the Last Judgment, he is implying that rather than wait for God to judge everyone, people jump to judge one another. That is, the narrator is yet again inferring from his own judgmental nature that all humanity is judgmental. In the same breath, he insists on the egotism of all his apparently virtuous or charitable actions—and, as usual, he seems to imply that this egotism is characteristic of everyone.
Themes
The narrator’s only excuse for his horrible behavior is that he isn’t truly capable of taking “human affairs” seriously. He claims to have a far better intuitive understanding of a self-controlled friend who quit smoking cold turkey but took it up again after reading about the hydrogen bomb than about someone who would sacrifice everything for their or their family’s wealth and status. The narrator himself only ever “played at” being serious and was only ever “sincere” when engaged in games. He claims to only ever “feel innocent” in stadiums or theaters.
Novelist Albert Camus is often associated with the philosophy of “absurdism,” which argues that life is senseless and ridiculous. While Camus’s works often suggest that the objective senselessness of reality requires individuals to choose subjective meanings and values for themselves, the narrator instead “play[s] at” seriousness hypocritically while recognizing his own falseness. His claim that he only ever “feels innocent” or “sincere” in the context of games implies that games impose a bounded, self-consciously limited set of rules and values on reality and action, rules and values that the narrator is unable to export to life generally.
Themes
The narrator hypothesizes that his inability to believe in any truly serious events motivated him to try to reject and escape “judgment” from both others and himself. Though his life looked externally admirable and people spoke well of him, he began to obsess over his own death. He started wondering whether he’d be able to complete a nebulous “task” he felt he had and fearing he’d die before he had admitted to someone—not God or a priest, but someone—all 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, the truth that he’s hiding in his apartment something that multiple countries’ police are looking for.
The narrator, continuing to speculate about his desire to escape “judgment,” censure, and guilt, here attributes that desire to his inability to take life seriously. This speculation suggests that the narrator doesn’t want to be judged because he doesn’t think anyone has the right to judge him—yet, in his egotism, he still wants people to have positive opinions of him. Meanwhile, his allusion to a precious object hidden in his apartment hints that that said object will be revealed later in the novel.
Themes
The narrator tells the listener that while he tried to tell himself that “Salvation” (i.e., annihilation) would come with death, he eventually reached a psychological breaking point. First, he wanted to avoid judgment by exposing his treachery to all, thereby joining the “side” of the judges. He began criticizing philanthropy, he claimed the “oppressed” were the real oppressors for making the well-to-do uncomfortable, and he voiced nostalgia for Russian serfdom. He also wrote a poem praising the police and visited atheist cafes only to invoke the name of God. He tells the listener that while these actions may seem trivial, he was trying to destroy others’ good opinion of him because he had lost his good opinion of himself.
In Christian theology, “salvation” refers to the state of being forgiven for one’s sins through the intercession (particularly the crucifixion) of Jesus Christ. For the narrator, by contrast, “Salvation” once meant annihilation—he thought he would be saved from sin, guilt, and judgment only through his own permanent death without an afterlife. The narrator’s transmutation of “Salvation’s” meaning shows how he uses Christian theological concepts almost metaphorically to understand his own existence without literally believing in Christian dogma. Additionally, his desire to join the “side” of the judges may hint at how he became a “judge-penitent”—he became a judge and loudly judges himself to preempt the judgments of others.
Themes
The narrator recalls how, one day, having been invited to give a lecture to early-career lawyers, he proposed a novel style of defense that would exonerate criminals “by exposing the crimes of the honest man, the lawyer,” who is internally flawed and guilty of great sins of omission if not commission. The alarmed early-career lawyers uneasily decided that the narrator must be joking. The narrator concludes by saying that this and similar outbursts didn’t help him, because self-condemnation isn’t enough to 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.”
By arguing that “the honest man, the lawyer” is as guilty of “crimes” as the criminal, the narrator once again suggests that every single person, honest and dishonest, is fundamentally guilty, deserving of judgment (in the social sphere) or prosecution (in the legal sphere). “Debauchery” usually refers to hedonistic behavior such as sexual excess, while a “little-ease” is a Medieval torture device. The narrator’s claim that he has to explain these concepts before explaining his profession of “judge-penitent” emphasizes how oddly circuitous his conversations with the listener have been.
Themes
