The Verdict on Albert Camus’s The Fall Essay example -- Literature The

The Verdict on Albert Camuss The FallAs if to mock the crumbling principles of a fallen era, The Just Judges preside over a stately dumping ground of earthly hell. This flimsy legion of justice, like the omnipresent eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, casts a shadow of pseudo-morality over a land spiraling towards pathos. But Albert Camuss The Fall unfolds amidst the seedy Amsterdam underground--a larger, more sinister prison than the Valley of Ashes, whose center is Mexico City, a neighborhood sedan and Mecca for the worlds refuse. The narrator and self-proclaimed judge-penitent, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, presides over his subjects every night to offer his services, although partially dissembled and highly suspect, to any who leave listen. More artfully than a stark widow preying on her unsuspecting mate, he traps us in his confessional monologue, weaving a web so intricate and complete that no one preempt escape its clutches.Clamence points o ut that Holland is a dreamof gold and smoke whose residents are somnambulists in the fogs gilded incense who have ceased to be (13-14). people by the living dead, where hundreds of millions of menpainfully slip out of bed, a bitter taste in their mouths, to go to a joyless work, Amsterdams concentric canals resemble the circles of hell, as in Dantes Inferno (144, 14). Hollands lost souls are the forsaken ones, machines who go through the motions of life but never truly live, the modern men, who fornicate and read the papers, with good intentions and bourgeois dreams never realized. These are the men capable of tolerating the Liebestod and the Holocaust in the same breath, who wait for something to happen, even unloving sla... ...risk your life. You yourself utter the words that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and that I shall at last say though your mouth O preadolescent woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the ch ance of saving us both (147)For Clamence it was in any case late, will always be (t)oo late, too far for him (70). But we are non he. We do not need to suffer from the paralysis of inaction. We need not relive unlucky Hamlets indecision each and every day nor question whether to dare disturb the universe. We have a choicewe will always have a choice. It is never too late for us, for we are endowed with freedom, and more importantly, a responsibility to be free. By all means, Do not go gentle into that good night,/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Dylan Thomas).Works CitedCamus, Albert. The Fall.