The Fall Analysis

*Amsterdam

*Amsterdam. Capital city of the Netherlands; at thirteen feet below sea level, it has the lowest elevation of any capital in the world. Its concentric canals are likened by Jean-Baptiste Clamence to the circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320; English translation, 1802). Its Zuider Zee is called by him almost a dead sea. He lives in the Jewish section and preaches in a bar, which he calls his church. Amsterdam, in this way, lends itself to various Judeo-Christian references, which include his own name, a pseudonym meaning “John the Baptist, crying out.” The references are ironic: Clamence does not believe in the Judeo-Christian deity, by whom he would, as a believer, be judged. Needing to be judged, he must, lacking a judgmental deity, judge himself for having lived inauthentically. His self-judgment includes his self-imposed exile from Paris to the equivalent of Hell (Amsterdam), where his penance consists of confessing his inauthenticity to anyone who will listen. He calls himself a “judge-penitent”: one who judges himself and carries out the penitential sentence imposed upon himself by himself. Furthering his secularization of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition is his recollection that, in the prison camp, he was given the role of “pope.” In the camp he contracted a disease, possibly malaria, and the climate of Amsterdam has aggravated that disease.

Mexico City Bar

Mexico City Bar....

The Fall is a long monologue, a confession, a methodical introspection. In contrast to the informal style of The Stranger, the...

The Fall is situated in the pessimistic moral tradition of the great seventeenth-century classicists, La Bruyere and La Rochefoucauld....

The only one of Camus's novels to have been adapted for the cinema is The Stranger, produced by Paramount in 1967 and directed by...