His final diatribe, regarding Empire does not absolve him, but instead accepts his own guilt in the indorination of feeling toward the desire to grow his empire. "One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how no tto end, how not to die." (133)This echoes his own thoughts, expressed when he was teetering on the stool waiting to be hanged, he said to himself that he would stand in that place until the flesh fell from his bones, "to live." (125) He divorces the idea of empire openly, with his sacrifice and torture and then remarries the idea that he has reason to feel guilty because he is indoctrinated in the nature of Empire. To him the only real innocence is the children, which he then realizes connects him to his paternal and incestuous love for the barbarian girl, who was the eventual cause of his demise, for it had been her who he had sought to return to her people, and...

Neither character truly comes to or even really seeks true forgiveness, even from himself, as they go about their daily lives realizing over and over how cruel the human system is and how each one of us knowingly and unknowingly becomes a cog in the wheel of human cruelty and destruction. Each seeks self-destruction to absolve their grief but finds it an empty answer and their thoughts unchanged from the indoctrination of power and ambition, guilt and corruption.
Works Cited

Camus, Albert the Fall. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1982.