In reading our second novel by Camus, The Fall, I've come to realize there seems to be an unspoken theme that Camus does not outrightly resolve (as is his way). In both The Fall and The Stranger we are presented with protagonists who fail to properly value their life, both the qualities of it, and the actual life itself.
In the case of The Stranger, Mersault is an unreflective, disconnected drifter who goes where his life takes him, ultimately to an untimely end. In what is to my mind an intentional polar opposite, The Fall features a man who is highly reflective, charismatic, successful and ambitious. Clamence experiences the fall the title suggests, going from a wealthy lawyer to an irrelevant old man through what can only be seen as perplexing circumstances. The events that Clamence describes as leading to his undoing are trifling. I would say that Clamence does not appropriately value his life, in this case not so much his actual possession of it, but rather what he is and has accomplished. He does not value it, and I would say, out of boredom, does away with it. The fall he experiences isn't something that happens to him, he throws away what he had, because it was wanting, it bored him, and he was unhappy. He dies in an unexciting way, as an old man. Every element seems to reflect the opposite of the stranger.
This leaves us with difficult conclusion to derive, should we be more dispassionate, as Mersault was? Or should we be more charismatic and motivated, as Clamence was? The end result would appear the same, and we could say that this is Camus' commentary on the Absurd and be done with it. But there is another element that links Mersault and Clamence that points to a solution. Neither man has any meaningful relationships in their lives, there is no one they live for, no one they truly love, or are loved by. The recent film, Into the Wild, concludes with the title character coming to the realization that, "Happiness is only real when shared". This seems to be one lesson we can take from Camus' two novels.
