Camus's The Fall

About The Fall

The Fall (La Chute, 1956) is Albert Camus's last completed novel — a monologue delivered in an Amsterdam bar by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former Parisian defense lawyer who has reinvented himself as a 'judge-penitent' who confesses his own sins to strangers in order to make them complicit in the judgment that follows. The most ironic and formally unusual of Camus's novels, it corrects what he saw as the earnestness of The Plague and draws on the Dostoevsky tradition of the self-lacerating underground man. Camus was killed in a car accident in January 1960 at forty-six, leaving The First Man unfinished; The Fall was thus his final statement in novel form, and its darker and more ambiguous tone has led critics to debate whether it represents a new direction or a terminal self-examination. It is best approached after The Stranger and The Plague establish the earlier Camus; it rewards rereading more than either predecessor.