Nausea

Book Overview

Nausea (1938) is Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel and one of the founding works of existentialist literature. Written as the diary of a thirty-year-old historian named Antoine Roquentin, the book records a slow, unsettling transformation: the growing awareness that things simply exist — pointlessly, without reason, without necessity — and that this sheer fact of existing can overtake a person like a sickness. The nausea of the title is not physical disgust in the ordinary sense. It is the felt experience of contingency, the recognition that the world is not required to be the way it is, and that nothing, including the human beings within it, carries its own justification.

Roquentin has settled in the fictional port town of Bouville ("Mudtown") to write a biography of an eighteenth-century French diplomat, the Comte de Rollebon. As the diary progresses, everyday objects begin to betray him. A pebble on the beach, a glass of beer, the face of a stranger, a root of a chestnut tree — each reveals, in a different way, the brute fact that it exists. The book ends not with a resolution but with a decision: Roquentin, having abandoned his biography, imagines writing a novel that would make people ashamed of their existence, a work of art that might justify a life.

The novel's diary form is essential to its effect. Because the reader watches the experience unfold day by day, the nausea is not asserted but witnessed. The book is at once a literary experiment, a phenomenological study, and a philosophical argument in narrative form — an argument about existence, essence, freedom, and the possibility of meaning.

Author Context

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was the central figure of French existentialism, a philosopher, novelist, playwright, and political intellectual whose influence spanned mid-century Europe and beyond. Before Nausea, he had trained in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, had studied Husserl's phenomenology in Berlin in 1933–34, and had been writing philosophical essays and short stories. Nausea grew out of these investigations. Sartre had long been preoccupied with the idea of contingency — the thought that everything that exists might just as well not have existed — and he had drafted the novel earlier under the working title Melancholia before publishing it as La Nausée in 1938.

The novel belongs to the same imaginative world as Sartre's later philosophy. Five years after Nausea, Sartre published Being and Nothingness (1943), in which he worked out systematically the ontology the novel dramatizes: the distinction between being-in-itself (the brute, opaque existence of things) and being-for-itself (the self-aware, self-surpassing consciousness that is human), and the thesis that existence precedes essence. Read in this light, Nausea is the literary counterpart of the later treatise. Roquentin's experience is the phenomenology in miniature; the later book supplies the technical vocabulary. Sartre also produced a famous film treatment of the novel, demonstrating how central its imagery was to his imagination.

Historical Background

Nausea appeared in Paris in 1938, a year shadowed by the rise of fascism, the approach of war, and the crisis of European culture. The 1930s were a decade in which the confidence of the Enlightenment and of bourgeois society seemed exhausted. The economic collapse of the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the growth of totalitarian movements, and the widespread sense that traditional values had failed all contributed to an intellectual climate in which questions about meaning, contingency, and human freedom became urgent.

The novel also belongs to a specific moment in the history of philosophy. In the decades before the war, Edmund Husserl had developed phenomenology as a rigorous description of experience, and Martin Heidegger had transformed it in Being and Time (1927) into an inquiry into the meaning of Being, human finitude, and authenticity. Sartre took up these tools but pushed them in a different direction. Where Heidegger asked about Being, Sartre asked about existence and freedom. Where the academic tradition offered system, Sartre offered the diary of a man in a provincial town. The philosophical novel was itself a genre with roots in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and the European literature of crisis, and Nausea stands at the head of a line of existentialist fiction that includes Camus's The Stranger (1942) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).

The novel's setting — Bouville, with its smug bourgeois statues and its respectable citizens — is a sustained satire of the settled world that existentialism was questioning. The portrait of the "Autodidact" (the self-taught man who reads the library's books alphabetically and collects humanism without understanding it) satirizes an uncritical faith in knowledge and progress. The historical background is thus not merely scenery; it is part of the argument about how societies protect themselves from the truth of contingency.

Core Ideas

Existence Precedes Essence

The central philosophical claim of Nausea is the one Sartre would later formulate as a slogan: existence precedes essence. Traditional metaphysics had assumed that things have an essence — a defining nature or purpose — that precedes and explains their existence. A paper knife, in Sartre's later example, is designed by a craftsman who knows what it is for; its essence (its function) comes before its existence. Human beings, the tradition assumed, are similar: they have a fixed nature, given by God, reason, or biology, that determines what they are and should be.

Nausea contests this picture. Roquentin discovers that human beings are not like paper knives. Nothing in the universe planned them; nothing defines them in advance; they simply exist, and their natures are made, not given. The discovery is liberating in principle — if there is no fixed essence, then there is room for freedom — but it is experienced by Roquentin as a kind of vertigo. The absence of a pre-given nature is also the absence of a guarantee.

Contingency

Contingency is the book's true subject. Something is contingent when it exists but need not exist — when its existence is not required by any reason, law, or purpose. Roquentin's revelation is that everything is contingent. The universe is not a system of necessary relations in which everything has its place; it is a jumble of facts that happen to be. The famous scene of the chestnut tree root in the public park makes this concrete. Roquentin stares at the root until its familiar qualities fall away and what remains is sheer existence: black, gnarled, excessive, inexplicable. The nausea rises because he realizes that existence is not something the world "has" but something that overflows everything. Existence is not logical; it is absurd in the sense of being without ground.

This is the philosophical meaning of the book's title. The nausea is the bodily registration of a metaphysical truth. It is what it feels like, Sartre suggests, to encounter being directly, without the comforting interpretations that ordinarily insulate us from it.

Bad Faith and Self-Deception

The novel also shows how people flee from contingency. The respectable citizens of Bouville take themselves to be solid, justified, necessary; their statues and rituals are attempts to cover the fact that they, too, are merely contingent. The Autodidact flees into abstract humanism. Anny, Roquentin's former lover, flees into the dream of "perfect moments." Each of these is an early sketch of what Sartre would later call bad faith (mauvaise foi): the project of denying one's freedom and contingency by pretending to be a thing with a fixed nature. Roquentin's honesty lies in his refusal to do this — in his willingness to keep looking at the root, the pebble, and the fact of his own existence.

Key Themes

The first theme is the experience of the body. The nausea is felt: in the throat, in the chest, in the palms. Sartre insists that philosophical insight has a bodily dimension, an anticipation of the phenomenology of the body he would develop later. A second theme is time and memory. Roquentin's diary is haunted by the past, by the impossibility of recovering lost moments and the inauthenticity of treating the past as if it were a possession. A third theme is the Other: the novel's portraits of the Autodidact, Anny, and the bourgeois citizens explore the ways we exist for others and the lies we tell about that existence. A fourth theme is art and meaning: the jazz song "Some of These Days" recurs as a fragile image of something that is not merely contingent — a melody that exists with a kind of necessity. The possibility that a work of art might redeem existence is the question the novel leaves open at its close.

Philosophical Meaning

The philosophical meaning of Nausea lies in its refusal to separate literature from philosophy. The novel does not illustrate a doctrine; it performs an investigation. The diary form lets the reader participate in the movement of consciousness itself, and the famous passages — the pebble, the root, the self-taught man, the final decision — are as much arguments as they are scenes. The book also anticipates the ethical core of Sartre's existentialism: if existence precedes essence, then no excuse, no nature, no God, and no social role can relieve us of responsibility for what we make of ourselves. Roquentin's despair is the price of this freedom, and his turn toward the novel is the beginning of a response.

Influence

Nausea changed the European novel and the course of philosophy in public culture. It established the philosophical novel as a vehicle for phenomenological and existential themes, and it prepared the ground for the extraordinary influence of Sartre, Camus, and the postwar existentialist movement. Camus's The Stranger, published four years later, inherits its atmosphere of detached, embodied awareness. In the decades after the war, Nausea became a set text for students of existentialism and a touchstone for writers as diverse as the French New Novelists and the American existentialists of the 1950s and 1960s. Its imagery — the excessive root, the queasy encounter with things — has become part of the common vocabulary of modern thought. Within Sartre's own corpus, the novel stands as the literary foundation on which Being and Nothingness built its technical system, and it remains the most widely read of his fictional works.

Related Quotes

From Nausea, in the Lloyd Alexander translation: "Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance." The sentence is the novel's thesis in miniature: existence is groundless, self-perpetuating, and accidental. It belongs with Sartre's later formula that existence precedes essence and with the insistence that we are condemned to be free. The nausea Roquentin experiences is the same condition Camus describes as the absurd: the clash between the human demand for meaning and the silence of a contingent world.

Sources

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander. First published in French as La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938); first English translation 1949; New York: New Directions, 1964. All quotations in this article follow this translation.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Jean-Paul Sartre." Scholarly context for the novel within Sartre's philosophy of existence, freedom, and bad faith.
3. Wikipedia, "Nausea (novel)." Publication history, characters, and reception.
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Nausea, novel by Jean-Paul Sartre." Concise critical overview of the novel's place in modern literature.