47 pages • 1 hour read
Albert CamusThe Fall
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Clamence and his cher ami ride a boat back to Amsterdam. The sea is covered in fog, and they cannot tell where the boat is going. Clamence compares the scene to dreaming. Clamence then shares his feelings about women, saying he believes women are the “natural harbor” for men in distress (100). He describes how he used to feel empty and wanted to be loved. He fell in love with a woman and became disappointed shortly after their relationship began; she did not satisfy him sexually, and he declared the whole concept of love a sham. Clamence tried being chaste afterward and failed quickly.
After his crisis, Clamence fell into debauchery and spent his days having sex and drinking. It made him feel immortal and let him dominate his past. He found debauchery liberating because it did not make him obligated toward anybody; it was only about using others to fulfill his desires. Clamence’s promiscuity and hard drinking took a toll on his body, and he was forced to give them up for his health. Clamence exited his spiral of debauchery, describing it as waking up from a “long sleep,” with a shattered reputation, but he believed himself cured of his depression.
However, the laughter continued haunting Clamence. His downward spiral did not alleviate his guilt over the drowned woman. Clamence accepted his guilt and lived in the “little-ease” as a result, a torture cell that was too small to stand upright in or lay down in. Clamence believes that Jesus was also struggling with feelings of guilt, which is why he let himself be crucified. Clamence finds it hard to justify living but easy to justify death.
Clamence thinks that people let themselves be persecuted like Jesus not to die for their guilt, but to be seen by many. He also believes that God is dead and has been replaced by judges on benches. He does not believe that the current state of morality is solely the fault of the Christians; he believes it is a symptom of European culture at large. He notes that a home that René Descartes stayed in has become a psychiatric hospital. Without God, Clamence believes everybody has to take on a Jesus-esque role and be sacrificed for others. Clamence, however, believes he has a solution to escape the endless cycles of guilt and duplicity of modern society. He promises to tell his friend the next day.
Chapter 5 Analysis
Chapter 5 explores Clamence’s guilt that underpins his beliefs. He compares his guilt to the “little-ease” torture cell. The little-ease is designed to never allow a prisoner to be comfortable; one can only find slightly more-comfortable positions. Clamence’s “solution” is founded on his guilt, which makes his “solution” always beholden to his guilt. By using the little-ease as a symbol, Camus implies that Clamence has not actually found a way to escape his guilt, only a way to temporarily ease his discomfort. The extreme ends to which Clamence goes to alleviate his guilt indicate that despite his self-aggrandizing monologues, his system of morality is not adequate because it does not allow him to come to terms with what he has done. Notably, this torture mimics the Christian religious process of mortification of the flesh, in which individuals atone for their sins by physically punishing themselves. Like the use of Dante’s Inferno, Clamence relies on a Christian framework to analyze the world around him, despite his claims that religion is a disempowering influence.
Clamence echoes Nietzsche in this chapter. He claims that God is dead, a famous Nietzsche quote, and he believes humans more than adequately torture one another. Clamence refers to Jesus’ “innocent crime” of being born and other babies being slaughtered when Herod wished to kill Jesus. By insinuating that Jesus harbored feelings of guilt, Clamence implies that innocence is an invention used by Christians to bludgeon others. Camus directly references Nietzsche when Clamence says that it isn’t only the Christians that should be blamed for this (116). Camus’s overt references to Nietzsche make The Fall a dialogue between his ideas and Nietzsche; by aligning Clamence and his imperfect concept of morality with Nietzsche, Camus disavows nihilism and puts forth absurdism as the antidote to nihilism.
Clamence recognizes that his “solution” is not a permanent one. He calls himself “an empty prophet for shabby times,” reflecting the theme of Alienation in the Modern Era (117). The image of Clamence as an “empty prophet” means he has nothing to offer people; he only wants to promote slavery to quiet his own guilt. The “shabby times” are reflected by the allegorical hell of Cocytus that he lives in, where he preaches the virtues of slavery at a bar named after a city built on slavery. Mexico City was built on top of the Aztec city Tenochtitlan after the Spanish conquistadors invaded in the 16th century, and the Aztecs who survived were enslaved. Here, Camus draws a line from early European colonialism through the transatlantic slave trade to the Holocaust, using the irony of Mexico City’s name and Clamence’s love of slavery to highlight moral bankruptcy.
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By Albert Camus
