the master

The master is a pivotal concept in Jean-Baptiste Clamence's confessional monologue, representing the authority figure he believes humanity desperately craves to escape the unbearable weight of freedom and the terror of being judged without a law. Clamence argues that in the absence of God, people will submit to any master—political, social, or personal—to achieve the comfort of slavery and collective guilt, a solution he both preaches and embodies in his role as a judge-penitent.

The Burden of Freedom and the Need for a Master

Clamence's philosophy of the master emerges directly from his analysis of freedom. He declares that "at the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that's why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you're down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody." For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence, he concludes, one must choose a master, God being out of style. This need is not merely theoretical; Clamence himself admits that on the bridges of Paris he learned that he was afraid of freedom. The master, therefore, is the solution to the existential terror of autonomy, a figure who will take the place of heaven's law and provide the order and certainty that modern man has lost.

The Master as a Substitute for God and Law

Clamence sees the master as a direct replacement for divine authority in a world that has rejected God. He observes that people are free and hence have to shift for themselves, but since they don't want freedom or its judgments, they ask to be rapped on the knuckles, invent dreadful rules, and rush out to build piles of faggots to replace churches. The essential thing, he argues, is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. This submission is framed as a collective solution: "When we are all guilty, that will be democracy." The master provides the law that modern man craves, for the keenest of human torments is to be judged without a law. Clamence himself, having discovered that he was afraid of freedom, decides on the sly that it had to be handed over without delay to anyone who comes along, and he preaches in his church of Mexico City, inviting the good people to submit to authority and humbly to solicit the comforts of slavery, even if he has to present it as true freedom.

The Master and the Dream of Domination

Clamence's personal psychology reveals a deep-seated desire to be the master, not merely to serve one. He admits that every intelligent man dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone, and he discovered in himself sweet dreams of oppression. His profession as a lawyer, which set him above the judge and the defendant, satisfied his vocation for summits and allowed him to live with impunity, like a god brought down by machinery to transfigure the action. This desire for mastery is also evident in his relationships with women, where he sought to dominate and possess, and in his reaction to the motorcycle confrontation, where his true desire was to be the stronger, to beat anyone he wanted. The master, then, is both an external authority to be submitted to and an internal aspiration to be realized, a duality that Clamence exploits in his role as a judge-penitent.

The Master as a Solution to Judgment

Clamence's invention of the judge-penitent profession is a direct response to the problem of judgment. He realizes that one cannot condemn others without immediately judging oneself, so he reverses the reasoning: one must overwhelm oneself to have the right to judge others. Inasmuch as every judge some day ends up as a penitent, one had to travel the road in the opposite direction and practice the profession of penitent to be able to end up as a judge. This allows him to dominate at last, but forever, having found a height to which he is the only one to climb and from which he can judge everybody. The master, in this context, is the ultimate judge, and Clamence, by becoming a judge-penitent, installs himself as that master, sitting enthroned among his bad angels at the summit of the Dutch heaven, watching the multitude of the Last Judgment ascend toward him. He pities without absolving, understands without forgiving, and feels at last that he is being adored.