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Themes
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Fall, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
In The Fall, the narrator implicitly argues that all human beings are “guilty,” in the sense that each individual is ultimately responsible for their own choices, some of which are inevitably bad. This universal guilt exposes all human beings to others’ judgment, a judgment that each individual finds intolerable and attempts to escape. The narrator illustrates the fundamental guiltiness of human beings by describing his own past self. The narrator was once an outwardly virtuous, praiseworthy lawyer focused on pro bono cases. Nevertheless, during a chance encounter with a young woman in black on a bridge at night, he chose not to intervene in her suicide by drowning—even after, once in the water, she began crying out. In other words, the narrator found himself accidentally responsible for someone else’s life and indirectly guilty for her death, a random responsibility and guilt based on his total freedom to choose to help or not help her. The woman’s fall into the water triggers the narrator’s “fall” from innocence, his sudden knowledge that he is responsible for his own free choices and capable of making the wrong choice. His fall from innocence in turn alludes to the Judeo-Christian Fall of Man, the story of humanity’s transition from sinless innocence to sinful knowledge of good and evil.
The remainder of the narrator’s story has to do with his attempts to avoid others’ judgment despite his knowledge of his own guilt. After attempting various distractions, he eventually decides that by publicly proclaiming his own guilt and judging himself, he can convince others of their guilt and so shift judgment onto them. Toward the novel’s end, the narrator reveals to his listener that all their conversations have been just such an attempt to foist guilt and judgment onto the listener, a ploy that the narrator feels he must enact because he is psychologically incapable of just forgiving himself. Thus, The Fall suggests that the only way to escape guilty self-condemnation and fruitless attempts to avoid judgment is to accept the responsibilities of freedom and forgive oneself for one’s mistakes—but most people are incapable of such free self-forgiveness.
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Guilt and Judgment ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Guilt and Judgment appears in each chapter of The Fall. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Guilt and Judgment Quotes in The Fall
Below you will find the important quotes in The Fall related to the theme of Guilt and Judgment.
Pages 3-16
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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.
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Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell?
Pages 17-41
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Of course, I didn’t tell you my real name.
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.
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.
That’s the way man is, cher monsieur. He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love.
Pages 42-71
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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.”
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.”
Oh, I don’t know. Really, I don’t know. The next day, and the days following, I didn’t read the papers.
Pages 72-96
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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.
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.
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.
Then I realized, as a result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to sin, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress.
Pages 97-118
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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.
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.
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They have hoisted him onto a judge’s bench, in the secret of their hearts, and they smite, they judge above all, they judge in his name. He spoke softly to the adulteress: “Neither do I condemn thee!” but that doesn’t matter; they condemn without absolving anyone.
Pages 119-147
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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.
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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.
Brr . . . ! The water’s so cold! But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!
