The Fall

“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.”

Clamence’s dehumanization of the bartender is marked by nostalgia. The “ulterior motives” are the duplicity Clamence mentions in later chapters and foreshadows Clamence’s mental health crisis.

“Haven’t you noticed that our society is organized for this kind of liquidation? You have heard, of course, of those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil that attack the unwary swimmer by thousands and with swift little nibbles clean him up in a few minutes, leaving only an immaculate skeleton? What, that’s what their organization is. ‘Do you want a clean life? Like everybody else?’ […] ‘O.K. You’ll be cleaned up. Here’s a job, a family, and organized leisure activities.” And the little teeth attack the flesh, right down to the bone.”

Clamence and his friend are both middle-class and cultured. Clamence is speaking directly to the expectations with which they were both raised. The metaphor of the piranhas makes the expectations of middle-class life look violent and murderous.

“I live in the Jewish quarter or what was called so until our Hitlerian brethren made room. What a cleanup! Seventy-five thousand Jews deported or assassinated; that’s real vacuum-cleaning. I admire that diligence, that methodical patience! When one has no character one has to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in history. Perhaps that’s what helps me understand the ape and his distrust.”

Clamence delights in the Holocaust’s atrocities. He takes it as a personal lesson to help him understand “the ape” bartender. Clamence is characterized as a man who sees the worst atrocities of history as entertaining anecdotes to share with strangers.