The Fall Analysis

The moment when Jean-Baptiste first hears laughter coming from the darkness of the water is big turning point. It’s what knocks him off the "bad faith wagon," so to speak. Of course, it’...

"Chance, convenience, irony, and also the necessity for a certain mortification made me choose a capital of waters and fogs, girdled by canals, particularly crowded, and visited by men from all cor...

(A technical note before we start: though The Fall does create a "you" character, it’s still considered a first-person narrative.)Point of view is fascinating in The Fall. As a narrator, Jean...

The Fall has been characterized as Modernist because it is so steeped in uncertainty and because Jean-Baptiste seems to defy any clear interpretation. Check out this passage:Isn’t it the most...

Reading The Fall can be a bit taxing on your brain. We can’t trust anything. Everything is foggy, confusing, potentially fake, potentially ironic, maybe even a big joke – it’s as...

You would have to read The Fall in the original French to see what we’re talking about when we call it "formal." The text reads like a rather stiff, linguistically proper confession, making u...

The idea of "The Fall," like every important concept in the novel, takes on more than one meaning. We’ll explore three of these meanings here, but you can come up with more.The most obvious i...

"Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously, to have held up as a model such an immoral character as A Hero of Our Time; others shrewdly noticed that the author had portrayed himself and hi...

There’s a lot to talk about in the last few paragraphs of The Fall. In short, Jean-Baptiste Clamence’s conclusion calls into question all of the arguments he makes in his "confession."...

Scholars have had a lot to say about the plot structuring of the novel. We’ve read everything from a super-cool theory that the plot is circular – like the canals of Amsterdam or Dante&...

Scholars have had a lot to say about the plot structuring of the novel. We’ve read everything from a super-cool theory that the plot is circular – like the canals of Amsterdam or Dante&...

You meet Jean-Baptiste Clamence in the Mexico City bar, and he begins his "confession." You hear all about his amazing career in Paris, his ease of living, and his self-satisfaction, all lasting ri...

If you thought religion in The Fall was confusing, look at what Camus had to say: "I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist." Oh… (Source: Camus's Notebooks)There’s a "post-punk"...

There’s no explicit sex, but Jean-Baptiste Clamence basically outlines his guidebook for how to be successful with the ladies. The juiciest bits of this novel come in when Jean-Baptiste decid...

Lohengrin, Arthurian Legend (1.13)Dante (4.13)Inferno (1.14 explicitly, the novel’s setting in general)D’Artagnan, from The Three Musketeers (3.15)Janus (3.9)Gabriel-Joseph de La Vergne...