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Pages 72-96
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 their boat is speeding along—it only appears motionless because, on the foggy Zuider Zee, there are no landmarks to indicate speed. After mentioning that his experience sailing in Greece was very different, the narrator suggests they sit down and proceeds to tell how, after his trying to smash his own reputation, he for a while tried to forget himself in affairs with women. Wanting love, he convinced himself that he loved. After his first love affair failed sexually, he went looking for a storybook romance but—being too much in the habit of loving only himself—couldn’t find it. He renounced sex, but without sex he found women dull. He suspects this was “the realm of truth”—to him “a colossal bore.”
The Zuider Zee was a bay in the North Sea that has since been dammed into a freshwater lake, Lake Ijssel. As the narrator and the listener boat along the Zuider Zee, the narrator yet again reminds the listener that the narrator’s affairs with women were fundamentally egocentric: he pretended to love women or even convinced himself he loved women only because he wanted them to love him. His casual claim that “the realm of truth” is a “colossal bore,” meanwhile, reminds readers that he already lied to the listener about his name and may be an unreliable narrator generally.
Themes
The narrator explains that eventually, unable to benefit either from love or from renouncing sex, he turned to sexual licentiousness and alcohol. He claims that this “debauchery” was really a suppressed egotistical longing for “immortality.” At last, however, his body gave out from alcohol abuse, and he became totally exhausted. He claims that despite his bad behavior, his reputation suffered less from said behavior that from his occasional outbursts, such as his mentions of God in courtroom speeches, which scared off clients who thought that religiosity would prevent the narrator from defending them well. Regardless, his career puttered along, and in his exhaustion, he believed he was past his “crisis.”
The narrator’s claim that his “debauchery”—his descent into sexual excess and alcohol abuse—was really an egotistical longing for “immortality” is somewhat opaque. He may mean that physical excesses, by focusing him on the present moment, helped him forget his future death. In this way, his excesses served as a substitute for conventional Christianity, which also promises “immortality” (of a very different kind) to the believer. Interestingly, the narrator claims that his sexual excesses and alcohol abuse damaged his reputation less than his occasional religious outbursts, a detail suggesting that people fear religiosity because they think religious people are more likely to be judgmental.
Themes
Yet, the narrator says, when he went on an ocean-liner trip to celebrate his crisis’s end, he saw a “black speck” in the ocean and nearly screamed for help when he realized that it was just trash, not a person. At that moment, he discovered that he would never stop hearing the cries from the Seine that he had heard that night on the bridge. He predicts that he will hear such cries on every body of water, which he calls “the bitter water of my baptism.”
As a Frenchman, the narrator most likely has a Catholic cultural understanding of Christianity. In Catholicism, baptism is a sacrament that removes original sin—inherent guilt with which every person is born—from the baptized party. Peculiarly, then, the narrator links the suicide of the woman in black—which made him conscious of his own guilt, egotism, and hypocrisy—with the sacrament that frees a person from inherent sin. With this link, the narrator indicates that he believes he didn’t become guilty when he failed to help the woman in black; rather, he was always already guilty—the woman in black simply showed him his guilt and, in so doing, set him on the path to seeking forgiveness.
Themes
The narrator tells the listener that at this moment, he realized he could not avoid his fate: he would spend the rest of his life in the “little-ease”—a Medieval torture device, a jail cell so small that the prisoner could neither stand nor lie down at full length. The narrator claims that the little-ease teaches a person his guilt. He also claims that no one put in a little-ease could be innocent. In addition, the narrator firmly believes in everyone’s guilt and no one’s innocence. Moreover, humanity doesn’t need religion “to create guilt or to punish”; the judgment of other human beings is enough.
According to the narrator, knowledge of one’s own guilt is essentially an experience of torture—hence his comparison of this knowledge to existence in the “little-ease.” By implication, this knowledge is so painful due to human egotism: we want to think well of ourselves, but our self-knowledge prevents us from doing so. We can neither “stand up” (give up egotism) nor “lie down” (forget our flaws). Meanwhile, the narrator’s claim that people don’t need religion “to create guilt or to punish” implies that in a secular world, the judgment of public opinion takes the place of God’s judgment in people’s psyches.
Themes
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The narrator argues that God’s real purpose would be to prove innocence, not guilt, which makes religion a “laundering venture.” Then, ambiguously, he claims that such a venture occurred “once but briefly, for exactly three years, and then it wasn’t called religion.” Now no such laundering occurs. Everyone is unclean, everyone tries to judge someone else first, and everyone ends up in the little-ease.
In Christianity, Jesus Christ’s atonement for all humankind’s sins through his crucifixion holds out the possibility of forgiveness to anyone who believes in him. The narrator may be referring to this Christian theology when he claims that religion’s true purpose is to establish innocence, not guilt. His contemptuous claim that this makes religion a “laundering venture” suggests that the narrator is too invested in universal human guilt to be genuinely interested in the possibility of religious forgiveness. Meanwhile, his reference to a three-year laundering venture that “wasn’t called religion” is ambiguous. He may be referring to the Holocaust; though the Holocaust is usually dated from 1941 to 1945, most Holocaust victims died 1942–1945, which would fit with the three-year timeline. If he does mean the Holocaust, he is suggesting that Nazi German anti-Semitism essentially consisted in declaring non-Jewish people clean or innocent by demonizing Jewish people. In this view, political violence against minority groups is a kind of scapegoating, “proving” the innocence and goodness of the majority by projecting all evil onto a minority group and then killing them.
Themes
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 the listener knows why “he” was crucified. The narrator claims that “he” must have been guilty of something—for example, the Slaughter of the Innocents, where other babies were killed in his place. The narrator claims that, due to this “innocent crime,” the man in question couldn’t bear living. Moreover, people have done this man’s memory a disservice by ascending his cross for self-promotion and using him as a pretext to judge others, even though he himself didn’t judge the woman guilty of adultery, for example.
The narrator never says the name “Jesus Christ,” but readers can infer that the narrator’s “he” is Jesus Christ, not only because Christ is the most famous victim of crucifixion but also because the Slaughter of the Innocents refers to a New Testament account of Jesus’ birth (Matthew 2:16-18), in which King Herod of Judea ordered all male Jewish babies in and around Jesus’ birthplace killed because he feared that baby Jesus might become a threat to his kingship. Though in Christian theology Jesus was born without original sin, the narrator is arguing that because Jesus was in some sense the “reason” that the Slaughter of the Innocents took place, he is guilty of a “crime” despite his “innocence.” Thus, the narrator does not exempt even Jesus Christ from his claim that all human beings are inherently guilty. Meanwhile, the narrator’s claim that Christians do Jesus Christ a disservice by using him as a pretext to judge others shows the narrator’s distaste for organized religion despite his evident respect for Christ himself.
Themes
The narrator claims that “he” wanted to be beloved, not to be a judge—but that while some people do love him, “even among Christians,” they aren’t very numerous. Then he argues that “he” was making a joke when he proclaimed that Peter, who denied him, would be the founder of his church—but that the Christians don’t get the joke; they just continue to pretend forgiveness while judging. Yet it’s not all the Christians’ fault. Everyone judges, no one forgives, and so everyone is guilty—or would be, if the narrator himself had not solved the problem!
When the narrator says that “even among Christians” some people love Christ, he suggests that loving, non-judgmental people are actually less common among people who claim to follow Christ—showing his disdain for organized religion. Peter was one of Jesus’ 12 apostles; he denied knowing Jesus after Jesus was arrested, shortly before the Crucifixion. In Matthew 16:18, Jesus calls Peter the rock on which he will build his church. The narrator claims that this must be a joke about the faithlessness of the church to Jesus, given Peter’s betrayal of Jesus. In other words, the narrator assumes that Jesus could not forgive Peter and make him an important part of the church because of Peter’s sinfulness—an attitude of the narrator’s betraying his own punitive, judgmental, unforgiving attitude.
Themes
The narrator notes that he and the listener have reached his home. While taking his leave, he claims that he is a godless prophet who warns the people all around him who judge “without a law.” The narrator’s role as a judge-penitent is to “announce the law.” Then he promises to tell the listener tomorrow what a judge-penitent is, noting that they are running out of time as the listener leaves Amsterdam in two days.
When the narrator describes himself as a godless prophet, he makes clear that despite his evident knowledge about and interest in Judeo-Christianity, he is not a believer, and his worldview is ultimately not based on Christian dogma. The narrator’s claim that he warns people who judge “without a law” implies that in a secular era, humanity has no common standards or values according to which the community can judge individuals—yet human beings persist on judging each other anyway. The narrator, as judge-penitent, then makes it his business to “announce the law”—presumably, the communal standards by which people can legitimately judge one another.
Themes
