Albert Camus's The fall

Emmanuelle A. Vanborre

pp. 35-49

in: Emmanuelle A. Vanborre (ed), The originality and complexity of Albert Camus's writings, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

The Fall, the last book Camus finished and published before his death, contains many reflections and valuable questions for the reader. Its importance has been minimized but we still view it as one of his most important works as it seems to bequeath the reader with essential comments and raises crucial questions on how to read a text, a literary text, and how to read others and reality. Numerous analyses of Camus's The Fall consider that the text is symbolic and offers commentaries on justice, culpability, responsibility, and so on.¹ We will take into account some of these concepts, adding to them an analysis of writing itself, of the status and role of language and thus, of a work of fiction. We will start with the relationship of the self with the other, then tackle the idea of witnessing, and conclude with the role of irony in this text.

Cited authors

Camus Albert