The Fall (Penguin Modern Classics)

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While Camus might not have been a systematic thinker like Heidegger, he did make considerable contributions to the field of philosophy. Camus showed little interest in metaphysics and ontology, one of the few reasons he denied identifying as an existentialist. Legacy of Albert Camus I’m sure I’ve exhausted you, but I must reiterate that The Fall is a marvelous novel. Elusive and complex, it is an excellent look in the mirror at our own guilt and the ways we flail about trying to understand what to do with it. It is a novel that uses much religious symbolism (you see the dove fly about the novel, for instance) and language to construct this very existential discourse. Laughter may be the best medicine, they say, but here it is a strategic plan to obtain power and superiority, laughing and judging all the way. An absolutely outstanding novel, all intricately woven in under 150pgs. Thank you for you time, I’ll pay our tab, and no I won’t judge you. Or will I…

Throughout the narrative, Camus presents a critique of modern society, challenging the reader to question their own moral responsibility and the values of the collective. The character of Clamence embodies the complexities of human nature, as he oscillates between sympathy and manipulation, arrogance and self-loathing. We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.’ You are the hero of the story, or at least the would-be hero — the one who is going to have the transformation that will change your world. The polarization is external to the novel. Set in Amsterdam, The Fall is narrated by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former Parisian lawyer. Through a series of conversations and monologues, Clamence recounts his life story and unfolds his deeply introspective and disturbing perspective on human nature. Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, on November 7 1913. He grew up impoverished in an already poor country. Despite these circumstances, Camus still made school his priority. He worked odd jobs to pay for his education and attended the University of Algiers.Now some critics have derived this to be, in part, a criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Paris leftists. Oliver Gloag writes in his Albert Camus: A Short Introduction—an excellent and succinct work of criticism I shall lend you if you like after our drinks—that Camus saw that they ‘ spoke of helping others but did not concretely help them.’ Many others have seen this book on the whole as Camus’ own self-criticism as well. Have you seen a photo of Camus, mon cher? Surely Clamence’s athletic description of himself could produce a striking portrait of the author in the mind's eye. Rumor has it the bridge scene mimics the suicide of his own wife, Francine, which he alluded to in a letter to his lover, the actress María Casares. Yes, my friend, Camus had many lovers under Francine’s nose, in fact the car accident that took his life was on a trip to where his three mistresses had all received letters from him announcing three different dates of arrival to ensure he had time with them all. Camus’s less than flattering thoughts on women as expressed in his diaries, Gloag tells us, are shared by Clamence himself who finds women a bore aside from intercourse and admits he lies to them to get them into bed. The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) and October’s pall follows September’s fire. Here the tree roots entangle sin and death. November is the last pause before winter renders final judgment on human activity. However, in this image of desolation is the seed of hope. The trees are a “thousand leafless crosses” that suggest a new intervention of God. The “lovely, silent, finished, clean” embrace of snow will quench the fire of the Fall. Spring will bring God’s compassion and “what mercy after such forgiveness?” Sources for Further Study Several years after the apparent suicide of the woman off the Pont Royal — and an evidently successful effort to purge the entire event from his memory — Clamence is on his way home one autumn evening after a particularly pleasing day of work. He pauses on the empty Pont des Arts and reflects: The Fall explores one of Albert Camus’s mind-boggling beliefs: we are each responsible. For everything. During his day, the World War II era, according to Camus, everyone living was at fault for the war. If they didn’t directly cause it, then it was their fault for not stopping it. Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His childhood was poor, although not unhappy. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist as well as organizing the Théâtre de l'équipe, a young avant-garde dramatic group.

Among other things, The Fall is an attempt to explain how humankind could be capable of perpetrating such evils. [ citation needed] Synopsis [ edit ] Life in Paris [ edit ] The main motive of the “Fall” is associated with the disclosure of the absurdity of the world and human nature. Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who at first sinned by virtue of his natural, invisible egoism, realizing himself as a hypocrite, does not abandon his essence, but finds a new excuse for continuing his usual life. The Fall” is divided into three sections, each named for an autumn month. The first section, September, begins with a powerful evocation of fall in New England, “New England comes to flower dying.” It is ironic that New England’s most colorful, attractive season is made not by the budding but the dying of leaves. From the first line, Bottum suggests an analogy to the life of Christian believers who by dying are born to immortal life. The first section continues with images of autumnal New England expressed most vividly in metaphors of fire, as “kindling trees” are set ablaze, each falling leaf “a spit of flame” to make “New England burning.”You may be tempted to assume, due to everything else about me and what I do and who I am as a person, that this is sheer laziness on my part. That because I do not enjoy "putting" "effort" "into" "things," I appreciate when a book takes me an hour or two to read. Remember the laughter we spoke of earlier, the one that unsettled him so much? It was laughter that made him think of judgment and those who pass it with sadistic glee. Admitting himself a sinner, he realizes laughter is his own way ‘ of silencing the laughter, of avoiding judgment personally.’ Laughter is his escape, and if we must imagine Sisyphus happy then perhaps we should also imagine him laughing. Maybe making lewd jokes about rolling his balls. No, don’t cheers me for that. ‘ Don’t wait for the Last Judgment,’ he says, ‘ it takes place every day’ and this is a true tragedy. Camus was against judgment as he often saw it as absurd, such as the way he wrote about it in Reflections on the Guillotine:

By the time Camus got to Paris, World War II had officially begun in France. He wanted to join the army but was unable to because he contracted tuberculosis when he was 17 years old. This didn’t stop Camus from serving his country: he became involved with the French Resistance movement as an underground journalist for the Resistance newspaper Combat. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest, he came at the age of 25 years in 1938; only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation served as a columnist for the newspaper Combat. The product of a troubled time in Camus’s life, The Fall is a troubling work, full of brilliant invention, dazzling wordplay, and devastating satire, but so profoundly ironic and marked by so many abrupt shifts in tone as to leave the reader constantly off balance and uncertain of the author’s viewpoint or purpose. This difficulty in discerning the book’s meaning is inherent in its basic premise, for the work records a stream of talk— actually one side of a dialogue—by a Frenchman who haunts a sleazy bar in the harbor district of Amsterdam and who does not trouble to hide the fact that most of what he says, including his name, is invented. Because he is worldly and cultivated, his talk is fascinating and seizes the attention of his implied interlocutor (who is also, of course, the reader) with riveting force. The name he gives himself is Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a name that evokes the biblical figure of the prophet John the Baptist as the voice crying in the wilderness (vox clamantis in deserto) and that coincides neatly with the occupation he claims to follow, also of his own invention: judgepenitent. The first level of religious allusion is to the Christian history of New England, a region settled by the Pilgrims fleeing religious persecution, followed by various ethnic and religious groups over the succeeding centuries. “The Fall” is set in New England towns with biblical and Christian names—Canaan, Salem, Bethel, Concord, Fairhaven, and Christmas Cove. Images of the religious heritage of New England are sprinkled throughout the poem: cities such as Boston and Plymouth that were founded by Pilgrims and Puritans, sermons preached by stern eighteenth century Anglican ministers, and the Irish chambermaids of nineteenth century Massachusetts and their devotion to weekly Mass.At the end of every freedom, there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you have a temperature, or you are grieving, or you love nobody.” L’Étranger, or The Stranger (sometimes The Outsider, depending upon the publisher), is by far Camus’ most famous novel. Camus was clearly inspired by his own personal experiences when writing the book, as the story is centered around a French man named Meursault who is living in Algeria. It was published in 1942. The Plague differs from its predecessor not only technically but also thematically. Camus’s inspiration for The Plague was no philosophical abstraction but a specific event of his own life: the frustration and despair he experienced during the war, when the aftermath of the Allied invasion of North Africa trapped his wife in Oran (while he was in the Resistance organization in the Massif Central) and cut off all communication between them. That experience started the fictional idea germinating in his mind, and a literary model—Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)—gave the idea more concrete form.

In the essay, Camus argues that humans act the way that we do because we are constantly searching for the meaning of life, even though there isn’t one. According to Camus, we rebel because of this ultimate frustration. The book also touches on the theory of absurdism, which is the idea that the human existence is a result of the attempt to draw meaning from our lives, and the pointlessness of trying to find that meaning, as it doesn’t exist. It’s a mouthful (and honestly quite depressing), I know, but I mentioned that Camus was a philosopher! The Fall is set in Amsterdam, whose concentric canals remind the cultivated, loquacious, 40-year-old narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, of the circles of hell. In a seedy sailors’ bar, he recounts his story to an unseen listener: how he attained a pinnacle of worldly success as a well-known lawyer in Paris, admiring his reflection in the gratitude of downtrodden clients who he served pro bono, not to mention in the submissive bodies and adoring smiles of the women he collected like medals. After a sinister confrontation with his own cowardice on the banks of the Seine, however, Clamence’s glowing self-appraisal begins to crumble: a strange disembodied laughter pursues him through the Paris streets. And so it is that he winds up in a dim Amsterdam bar, recasting himself as a “judge-penitent” who seduces unsuspecting listeners with his self-damning monologue, but only to force an equally nasty self-confrontation in the other, thereby affirming his own dominance.Camus' idea of the Absurd was apparent in several of his works, such as The Stranger and The Plague. The philosophical views expressed in Camus' work made him well-known in philosophy. Sartre read his work and considered him less of a novelist and more of a writer of philosophical tales. Camus is known first and foremost for his writings, but he was also a French Resistance fighter and a philosopher. He was born and grew up in Algeria, a French colony at the time. Camus’ early life greatly influenced his writings, and he was famously anti-colonialist. He worked for a leftist newspaper in Algiers until it was eventually shut down, and then decided to move to Paris in 1940.