The Painting Symbol Analysis

In The Fall, the stolen painting symbolizes the loss—or the nonexistence—of legitimate objective standards by which people can judge each other. The narrator first mentions the painting early in the novel, directing his listener’s attention to an empty wall of the bar they’re at and telling him a painting used to hang there. A while later, the narrator tells the listener that he is giving legal advice to another patron of the bar, who pulled off “the most famous theft of a painting”—without revealing to the listener that the absent painting in the bar and the painting his client stole are the same. Later, the narrator hints to the listener that he has “an object” at home that law enforcement officers are searching for, again without revealing the identity of the object.

It is only in his final conversation with the listener, at the novel’s end, that the narrator reveals he has in his possession Van Eyck’s “The Just Judges” (c. 1430–1432), a real painting stolen from the Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium in 1934 and never recovered. He explains that his client sold it to the bartender of their usual bar and that the bartender gave it to him, the narrator, for safekeeping after learning its criminal history. When the listener asks the narrator why the narrator didn’t return the painting to law enforcement, the narrator gives a series of specious justifications for his choice. For example, he argues that the painting belongs to the bartender, not him. The narrator’s sophistical and internally contradictory rationalizations of his behavior with regard to the stolen painting emphasize the novel’s position that people no longer share—and perhaps never truly shared—objectively valid and universally accepted standards for behavior, meaning that every person is free (indeed required) to judge his or her own behavior according to individual standards.