Another absurdist is present in this novel. Raymond, a malicious, manipulative and deceiving person would accommodate his personality and nobody loves this Raymond. He would be placed in the same category as the conqueror. Just like the conqueror, he lies and deceives in order to obtain what he is seeking. It begins …show more content…
He does not see it yet until he meets the women on the bridge. Clamence is coming out of his regular bar when he walks passed a woman in a black dress. The black dress did not cross the mind of Clamence that if she might be in a state of depression. He hears the splashing of the water as the women jumps into the freezing water. If what Clamence does for a living, doing good deeds for the helpless then he would consider a way to save this woman. Instead, he proceeds walking away. “Yet La Chute makes it clear that Clamence’s judgement is selective.” (Holman 145) He is not a selfless man, but one who determines whether if it is worth his time or not. Maybe if it were in daylight and people were around to watch that would be more of motive to attempt to save her. Clamence begins to face the absurdity in his life, and it has cast him into the life he is living now. He passes the first question of absurdity and suicide, and continues on living, seeing that his life was still worth something. He moved from Paris, a place where he considered heaven into a hell in Amsterdam. He is to never leave the island he is on, because a bridge is needed to cross onto another one. He is contained in the absurd walls because the bridge represents the absurdity in his life. He knows that all those lives he helped in the orphans were meaningless, because he could not have the compassion to risk his own life for another. “Love Your Neighbor as Yourself: not that the sense of special self-love should be expanded to embrace just a brother, or a close friend, but that any fellow citizen, or even fellow human, should be shown the same degree of concern that one feels for oneself. Those who fail to expand their concern outward in this way have, it is often suggested, stumbled at a crucial stage of their moral development they are destined to become psychopaths, or at least sad cases or “arrested development.” (Cottingham 799-800).