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Pages 42-71
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Fall, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt and Judgment
Freedom vs. Domination
Egotism
Hypocrisy and Inauthenticity
Judeo-Christianity
Summary
Analysis
The narrator praises the “quaintness” of the village on Markan Island but tells the listener that he plans to reveal more than mere quaintness. After praising the gray, featureless landscape, he says that the clouds the listener notices in the sky are actually flocks of doves. Then he asks whether the listener understands him and says he no longer has the clarity of speech his friends used to admire. Immediately thereafter, he corrects himself for saying “friends,” claiming he only has “accomplices”—but his accomplices consist of all humankind, especially the listener.
When the narrator claims he has no “friends,” only “accomplices,” he implicitly casts himself as a criminal whose crime everyone is implicated in. With this metaphor, the narrator continues his habit of condemning himself while implying that everything he condemns himself for is also true of all other human beings—who, by extension, ought to be condemning themselves as well.
Active
Themes
The narrator claims that he knows he has no friends because when he considered dying by suicide to “punish” them, he realized “no one would feel punished.” Besides, it’s pointless to die by suicide, because one can’t witness others’ shock and guilt at one’s death—and most people one leaves behind don’t actually suffer long from one’s death anyway. Additionally, people will attribute “idiotic or vulgar motives” to the dead person. And finally, the narrator admits that he’s too egotistical for suicide.
The narrator’s desire to “punish” his friends hints at his judgmental and vindictive attitude toward others, an attitude that may make readers question his apparently friendly relationship with the listener. Meanwhile, the narrator dismisses suicide for entirely egotistical reasons: one can’t enjoy other people’s pain at one’s death and one will be misunderstood as “idiotic or vulgar” afterward. Thus, the narrator once again displays simultaneous self-hatred and general misanthropy even as he buddies up to the listener.
Active
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As an example of his egotism, the narrator admits that even after he remembered his own faults, he tried to forget them while continuing to judge others harshly. The purpose of this double-step was “to elude judgment,” a hugely difficult proposition given how judgmental absolutely everyone is. He compares his former self to an “animal tamer” who walks into work with a bloody cut, knowing that the animals will attack him. He began to suspect that his friends, who used to seem so deferential, were judging him and laughing at him. In his hypersensitive state, he realized that he had “enemies” who hated him for having failed to share his previous luck with them; once he realized people hated him, he felt that the entire world was laughing at him.
The narrator argues that people judge others to avoid being judged. All people see themselves as “innocent.” Men love to hear that they are naturally virtuous. They don’t like others to praise them for their hard work at becoming virtuous, even though being naturally virtuous isn’t praiseworthy. Criminals, meanwhile, love to hear that their crimes resulted from their circumstances rather than their characters, even though they are no more responsible for their characters than their circumstances. Everyone just wants “irresponsibility” and innocence, that’s all. That’s one reason people want to be rich—they can use their wealth to “isolate[]” themselves socially and so temporarily avoid others’ judgment.
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The narrator warns the listener not to believe anyone who asks him to be honest with them—they don’t want honesty but only to believe more deeply in flattering lies. People’s desire to avoid judgment means they rarely reveal themselves to their superiors in character. Instead, they reveal themselves to others like them, expecting sympathy and reassurance rather than any encouragement to improve their characters. The narrator asks whether the listener knows Dante. When the listener says he does, the narrator mentions that Dante placed the angels who failed to take sides between God and Satan in Limbo and claims that that’s where people find themselves—in Limbo.
Active
Themes
In response to something the listener says about “patience,” the narrator agrees that patience is required to await the Last Judgment—but everyone is impatient, including him, which is why he became a “judge-penitent.” Yet before he could do so, he had to go on a journey of self-discovery, confront the laughter, and realize his own internal complexity. He discovered that he was leveraging all his apparently good qualities to self-interested, egotistical ends. For example, he used to keep humbly quiet about his birthday so he could wallow when people forgot it.
The narrator’s only excuse for his horrible behavior is that he isn’t truly capable of taking “human affairs” seriously. He claims to have a far better intuitive understanding of a self-controlled friend who quit smoking cold turkey but took it up again after reading about the hydrogen bomb than about someone who would sacrifice everything for their or their family’s wealth and status. The narrator himself only ever “played at” being serious and was only ever “sincere” when engaged in games. He claims to only ever “feel innocent” in stadiums or theaters.
Active
Themes
The narrator hypothesizes that his inability to believe in any truly serious events motivated him to try to reject and escape “judgment” from both others and himself. Though his life looked externally admirable and people spoke well of him, he began to obsess over his own death. He started wondering whether he’d be able to complete a nebulous “task” he felt he had and fearing he’d die before he had admitted to someone—not God or a priest, but someone—all his lies, lest the truth die with him. As an aside, he claims to the listener that by contrast, he now loves the idea of the truth dying with him—for example, the truth that he’s hiding in his apartment something that multiple countries’ police are looking for.
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Themes
The narrator tells the listener that while he tried to tell himself that “Salvation” (i.e., annihilation) would come with death, he eventually reached a psychological breaking point. First, he wanted to avoid judgment by exposing his treachery to all, thereby joining the “side” of the judges. He began criticizing philanthropy, he claimed the “oppressed” were the real oppressors for making the well-to-do uncomfortable, and he voiced nostalgia for Russian serfdom. He also wrote a poem praising the police and visited atheist cafes only to invoke the name of God. He tells the listener that while these actions may seem trivial, he was trying to destroy others’ good opinion of him because he had lost his good opinion of himself.
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Themes
The narrator recalls how, one day, having been invited to give a lecture to early-career lawyers, he proposed a novel style of defense that would exonerate criminals “by exposing the crimes of the honest man, the lawyer,” who is internally flawed and guilty of great sins of omission if not commission. The alarmed early-career lawyers uneasily decided that the narrator must be joking. The narrator concludes by saying that this and similar outbursts didn’t help him, because self-condemnation isn’t enough to achieve innocence. He didn’t hit upon the right method until later. Then he tells the listener he must explain about “debauchery” and “the little-ease” before finally revealing the meaning of “judge-penitent.”
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