The Fall

Quick recap. I read The Stranger in 2013 and absolutely loved it. I read The Plague last year and didn't enjoy it quite as much. Both are novels by the twentieth century philosopher Albert Camus, a man who described himself as an absurdist: someone who recognizes the dualism of man's need to search for meaning and truth in an apparently indifferent universe but being unable to find any.

The Fall is Camus's third and final novel, published in 1956 only a few years before he died in a car accident at 46. It's got to be his most complicated novel, and consensus opinion considers it his least-understood. It's less than 150 pages long, but it's structured as an enormous long-winded monologue directed by the narrator to his audience, the reader. To give a brief synopsis, the narrator was a wildly successful lawyer in Paris before coming to a stunning realization: that he and everyone else alive are all horribly guilty people deserving of harsh judgment. The narrator has made his peace with this, and further judges himself accordingly for doing so. He quits his noble job and moves to the slums of Amsterdam in order to lead a life of debauchery and debasement. The book ends with an invitation to the reader to join him by confessing to a general guilt, accepting judgment, and moving on with that burden while trying to ignore it.

It's a complex and enigmatic text made all the more unclear by the fact that Camus died so soon after writing it. Is the narrator a mouthpiece for Camus, or is he meant to be ironic? Are our sins and transgressions forgivable, or should we suffer from guilty consciences? The narrator suggests that we all deserve to be judged harshly for our actions and inactions alike, but he also seems completely at peace with the judgment he casts upon himself. Is the moral here that judgment is inevitable and not worth worrying about, or is Camus casting some degree of accusatory shame on society at large? The narrator seems deeply bitter and cynical - not unlike the main character from The Stranger. But then, The Plague gave off a moderately optimistic view, and one could take the same vibes away from The Fall: in a certain light, it reads like one giant self-acceptance piece. So how does Camus really feel?

I came away from this one without a very clear understanding of Camus's message, but that's probably okay; so did everyone else, and it was still a beautiful book to read regardless. I enjoyed it more than The Plague, even if I understood it less. Still, The Stranger ranks as the top Camus book all around as far as I'm concerned. Check it out!