The Fall: Pages 17-41 Summary & Analysis

At a later meeting, the narrator says that he can tell the listener what a “judge-penitent” is, but he’ll have to explain a few other facts first. He admits that he gave the listener a false name earlier. In fact, the narrator used to be a famous Parisian lawyer who focused on charitable cases with victimized defendants, both because he liked “being on the right side” and because he disdained judges, whose profession he found entirely peculiar. As an aside, he mentions that people can’t live without “the joy of self-esteem,” going so far as to claim people will be driven to murder if they lose that feeling.

The narrator claims that he was excellently positioned for self-esteem as a lawyer. He avoided corruption, financial and otherwise. He never toadied up to anyone, and he represented poor clients for free without bragging about it. However, his love of performing charitable acts eventually overwhelmed him. He would fight other well-meaning persons to help a blind person cross the street would rejoice to see beggars for the joy of giving them money, even as one devoutly Christian friend of his confessed in embarrassment that their first reaction to seeing beggars was negative.

The narrator also claims that he had excellent manners. People thought he was charitable for his giving—as indeed he was. Then he notes that he was always “needed to feel above,” even physically—he likes heights, for example high balconies above the “human ants.” Working as a lawyer gratified these tastes in the narrator. He was always indebting others to him and never indebted to others, always judging the judges and never judged by them. He speculates that some murderers he defended committed their crimes to become famous—while he got more permanently and blamelessly famous as a defense attorney on high-profile cases. The narrator compares his life then to living in the Garden of Eden.

The narrator insists to the listener that his life back then was basically perfect, occasionally hedonistic, and socially satisfying. Though a mere officer’s son, he sometimes felt like a prince or a “burning bush.” He felt that he was not merely superlatively intelligent, but somehow chosen. The narrator remarks that his feeling of being chosen was particularly strange as he was in no way religious. He admits that he continues to yearn for the years he felt that way, which continued “until the evening when . . .” Then he cuts himself off. 

The narrator suggests that, on the other hand, perhaps he is overestimating the joys of his prior life. After all, he was hedonistically “satisfied with nothing” until the fateful day he mentioned. The narrator calls the bartender for another drink and admits that he wants his listener to give him “understanding,” even as he thinks that understanding is a far shallower emotion than friendship—though, as to that, one’s friends can push one to die by suicide, and one’s family is always on the attack.

When the listener asks the narrator about the “evening” he mentioned earlier, the narrator encourages the listener to wait and claims that his discussion of friendship is (sort of) on topic. He goes on to argue that we’re more generous with and admiring of our dead friends than our living ones because with dead people “there is no obligation”—we have to spend only as much time on them as we want. Moreover, we enjoy the emotional suffering of grief: people “can’t love without self-love.”

The narrator tells a story about how he had a genuinely nasty concierge. Despite the concierge’s nastiness, the narrator went to his funeral. He asks, rhetorically, whether the listener can explain this decision. Additionally, the concierge’s wife, who mourned her husband theatrically and spent a lot of money on his funeral, nevertheless began cohabiting with another man a month later, a man who violently abused her. Appearances notwithstanding, the narrator claims that nothing proves the wife didn’t love the concierge or the man who beat her. Moreover, he argues people who seem more respectable are “no more faithful” and gives as an example a man who realized after 20 years of self-sacrificing marriage to a stupid woman that he didn’t care about her—he’d stayed with her out of boredom and a desire for “drama.”

The narrator says that, on the decisive evening mentioned earlier, he was walking along the quays of the Seine after a day’s philanthropic work and successful socializing. He was feeling strong and whole when he heard laughter. He searched for the person laughing but saw no one, though he heard the laugh again. His heart was beating hard, and he was struggling to breathe. Later that night, at home, he heard laughter from outside, saw people on the sidewalk, and dismissed the sound. Yet when he went to the bathroom, he saw a “double” smile in the mirror.

Abruptly, the narrator promises to meet up with the listener the next day. Now, however, he has to go give legal advice to a murderous art burglar who pulled off a notorious painting theft. When the listener asks what painting the burglar stole, the narrator suggests he may reveal that information later. He also says that while primarily a “judge-penitent,” he also gives legal advice to the people in the bar, partly out of principle: by keeping criminals from always being punished, he keeps “decent people” from believing that they’re “constantly innocent,” a state of affairs that would turn life into an absurdity.