The Stranger and The Meursault Investigation – June CC Book Club Selection

[mathmom]

Reporting back because I finished The Fall, which does indeed making interesting reading along with the two books we read. Spoiler alert!

The narrator starts off talking to an unnamed person in a bar - telling his life story and his guilt about not having tried to save a woman who fell off a bridge. From the way he describes the incident, I think it’s unlikely he could have done much, but the fact (?) is that he didn’t try. Since then his life as fallen apart and he now calls himself a judge-penitent. He goes around confessing his sins with the goal of making others realize they are all sinners just like him.

Toward the end he says this:

I know what you’re thinking: it’s very hard to disentangle the true from the false in what I’m saying. I admit you are right. I myself … You see, a person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden. I’ll let you choose the pigeonhole that suits me.

But what do I care? Don’t lies lead eventually to the truth? And don’t all my stories true and false, tend toward the same conclusion?

And then a bit later, he’s talking about a just punishment for his various crimes:

You would arrest me then; that would be a good beginning. Perhaps the rest would be taken care of subsequently; I would be decapitated, for instance, and I’d have no more fear of death; I’d be saved. Above the gathered crowd, you would hold up my still warm head, so that they could recognize themselves in it and I could again dominate - as exemplar. All would be consumated; I should have brought to a close, unseeen and unknown, my career as a false prophet crying in the wilderness and refusing to come forth.