The Fall Study Guide

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913 in French Colonial Algeria to an ethnically French but Algerian-born family. His father was killed fighting in World War I (1914–1918) less than a year after his birth, and his mother was poor and illiterate. Despite an impoverished childhood, Camus won a scholarship to attend a well-regarded secondary school in 1924. In 1933, he matriculated at the University of Algiers, where he studied philosophy, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1936. In 1940, Camus moved to Paris; shortly thereafter, he tried to fight in World War II (1939–1945), but the French Army rejected him due to his history of tuberculosis. After Nazi Germany occupied France, Camus worked for the French Resistance against the Nazi occupiers. Also during World War II, Camus published his first and most famous novel, The Stranger (1942), about a man who commits a senseless murder in Algeria. During his lifetime, he published two more novels, The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956). He also wrote half a dozen plays and was a prolific publisher of nonfiction. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three years later, in 1960, he died in a car accident at age 46, after which two more of his novels, one incomplete, were published posthumously.

Albert Camus’s The Fall makes pointed references both to the Holocaust, the genocide that Nazi Germany committed against Jewish people in Europe during World War II (1939–1945), and to the Nazi occupation of France. Nazi Germany invaded France in May 1940 and largely controlled France by the end of June 1940; from June 1940 to August 1944, France was administrated by the so-called Vichy government, a Nazi-controlled French state under the leadership of Philippe Pétain (1856–1951). In 1942, Vichy France collaborated with Nazi Germany to deport ethnically Jewish people from France to concentration camps. During the Nazi occupation of France and the Vichy government period, anti-Nazi guerilla fighters known as the French Resistance sabotaged the Nazis, published illegal newspapers, and gave aid to Allied forces fighting the Nazis. Ultimately, Allied forces aided by the French Resistance liberated France from the Vichy government and from Nazi control from August 1944 through May 1945. During his time in Nazi-occupied Paris, Albert Camus was a member of the French Resistance, writing for a banned anti-Nazi newspaper Combat. In The Fall, the narrator mentions having considered joining the Resistance but having fled Nazi-occupied France for North Africa instead.

The Fall (1956) is the third of three novel’s Camus published during his lifetime, the other two being The Stranger (1942), about a French man who commits an apparently unmotivated murder in colonial Algeria, and The Plague (1947), about an epidemic decimating a city in colonial Algeria in the 1940s. Like The Fall, The Stranger and The Plague are philosophical novels that express Camus’s “absurdism,” a theory according to which existence is objectively meaningless and human beings must embrace their freedom and responsibility to create subjective meaning and purpose for themselves. Though Camus frequently rejected the label of “existentialist,” his literary works are also frequently associated with existentialist philosophy. Other philosophical novels associated with existentialism include Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), about a young man who becomes increasingly, viscerally disgusted by the objects and people around him, and Simone de Beauvoir’s Inseparable, written in 1954 but not published until 2020, about an intense relationship between two young women. Finally, The Fall makes repeated reference not only to Judeo-Christian narratives generally but also specifically to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (c. 1321), an epic poem about the journey of a pilgrim soul through hell, purgatory, and heaven.