The Fall by Albert Camus    {Reviewed by THOMAS} “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.” Addressed throughout (over five days) to a mute companion met in a bar in Amsterdam, as indeed the narrator began addressing the reader in the bar in Amsterdam (draw your own conclusion), and with, throughout, an increasingly intimate tone as it becomes clear that the narrator is including not only this mute companion but the reader who is that mute companion and indeed all humanity in his demolition of ethical frameworks, The Fall is a demonstration of the hypocritical assumption of ethical frameworks used to justify the basest selfish motives, an attempt to comprehend how humans are capable of doing horrendous things to one another, from the personal level to the generalised, and an assertion that all human motives are base and selfish. The stronger the assertion of propriety, the stronger the guilt it ornaments. More than an expression of ambivalence, the narrator undertakes a meticulous erasure of distinction between each impulse and its opposite, between virtues and vices, between propriety and crime, between nobility and selfishness, to the extent that the very concepts of virtue, vice, propriety, crime, nobility and selfishness are nullified not so much by their superimposition as by the fact that there is no border between them, that the extolling of a virtue segues into the justification of a vice with no change of tone or content. The basest self-interest can be presented as a virtue (“I announced the publication of a manifesto exposing the oppression that the oppressed inflict on decent people”) and the narrator throughout is intent on presenting himself either as the victim of the inescapability of his crimes and shortcomings or presenting his crimes and shortcomings as virtues and strengths. Everything that seems like a confession is ultimately a justification, everything that seems like humility is pride. “The question is to elude judgement. I’m not saying to avoid punishment, for punishment without judgement is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune.” But the avoidance of judgement gives rise to a longing for the relief that judgement provides, and this ambivalence, ridiculous in itself, is nullified by the narrator’s ridiculing of the concept of judgement (where the state is sympathetic, the act is unsympathetic). “It is better to cover everything, judgement and esteem, in a cloak of ridicule.” Likewise, freedom pursued without trammel becomes a burden, and the free long for the slavery which would relieve them of choice, blame and guilt. “The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a rogue greater than oneself. When all are guilty, that will be democracy.” Although the narrator glibly justifies his monstrous behaviour, whether than be the taking of water from a dying man in a desert prison camp, or the keeping of a stolen painting or the contempt acted upon his lovers, he also reveals the initial wrongdoing (or wrongnondoing) which began his tumult into justified vice: his failure to respond (because the water was cold) when hearing a woman throw herself from a bridge into the Seine. The way to even the most horrendous actions springs from an instance of culpable inaction. “But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!"