The Fall

By Albert Camus

1956

Philosophical Novel

Camus's last completed novel, presented as a sustained monologue delivered by Jean-Baptiste Clamence to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar. A former Parisian defence lawyer who once enjoyed his own virtue, Clamence recounts the moment he failed to save a drowning woman and the long unravelling of his self-image that followed. He styles himself a "judge-penitent" — confessing his own guilt only to implicate the listener, and by extension the reader, in the same hypocrisies. A taut meditation on guilt, judgment, vanity, and the impossibility of innocence in the modern world.