Fall Camus's Story, the Fall Term Paper

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.. Anyone who has considerably meditated on man, by profession or vocation, is led to feel nostalgia for the primates. They at least don't have any ulterior motives." (Camus, 4) Passion as well might make one authentic, or a true and mindless embrace of any aspect of life. Truthfully, the story does little to present us with true authenticity, because the narrator himself never discovers it.

The meaning of this story may seem very difficult to grasp if one makes the assumption that the narrator speaks for the author as a voice of wisdom and reason. Actually, no such assumption needs to be made. Camus is well-known for writing ironic works in which the speaker is not a mouth-piece for virtue. A key to this work may be found in something which Camus wrote shortly before-hand regarding his falling-out with Sartre. "Existentialists! Whenever they accuse themselves, you can be sure it is invariably in order to assail others. [they are] Penitent judges." (in: Raskin) Because of this quote, and the similarities between certain elements of the story's philosophy and that of the existentialists, some critics consider this story to be "at least in part a mordant satire directed against Sartre and the philosophical position for which he stood." (Raskin) if this is the case, then we are being happily invited to mock the ideas of the narrator, who thinks that human society and esteem is enough to make one justified, or that there is meaning in such an interplay of guilt and righteousness.

The former title, "A Hero for Our Times," precisely pinpoints this problem. Sartre and others whom Camus considered hypocritical or overly life-rejecting were becoming central philosophical and social figures. Camus mocked them, proclaiming them as heroes specifically so the reader could see how anti-heroic they actually were. The later title, "The Fall," appears to have been given after Camus' reading audience failed to understand the irony and objected to the narrator being held up as a hero. This title too, though, has some meaning behind it, for it focuses less on the author's opinion of the narrator and rather on the narrator's experience.

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The narrator, like Adam and Eve, has eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil -- precisely knowledge about his own sin nature -- and hence cannot be happy until he has both been accepted by others as a sinner and proven them sinners as well. With this new title, the story returns to its religious focus on the nature of human evil.

If one were to ask what deep philosophical truths actually could be gleaned from this text, the only suggestion that arises would be this:

one must be truly authentic, for anything less leads to emptiness, despair, and judgment. One cannot judge one's self or others for the sake of pleasing the soul, but rather must judge life itself for the sake of knowing how to act. Moral judgments, such as how to respond when attacked, or when one has the ability to save another's life, cannot be made based on how it will appear to others, but on how it appears to one's self. Placing morality outside the consciousness, as Sartre and this narrator try to do, saying "Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day...we are all judges, we are all guilty before one another." (Camus)

Rather than attempting to live to the wishes of others, or of God, Camus suggests that we rather live so that we can judge only ourselves. To do otherwise is to yield to the judge-penitents of the world who seek to condemn us for their own sins.

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