Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)
“A man picks up a pebble on a beach and suddenly cannot put it down — because he realizes, for the first time, that existence has no reason to exist.”
At a Glance
Antoine Roquentin, a historian living alone in the French port city of Bouville, begins keeping a diary to record a disturbing shift in his perception of reality. Ordinary objects — a pebble, a door handle, a chestnut tree root — cease to seem natural and begin to appear viscerally alien, contingent, and grotesque. This sensation, which he calls nausea, is the direct experience of existence stripped of meaning. Over several weeks, he abandons his historical research, ends his relationship with his former lover Anny, and discovers that only art — specifically, a jazz record — offers any relief from the horror of pure being.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Nausea is the founding text of literary existentialism — the first major work to dramatize rather than merely argue the philosophical position that existence precedes essence and that human consciousness is confronted with radical, unjustified freedom. Published in 1938, it appeared in the year before Europe went to war, and its diagnosis of bad faith, contingency, and the failure of humanist ideology proved prophetic. It launched Sartre's career and established the existentialist movement that would dominate European intellectual life for two decades.
Diction Profile
Formally educated prose that deliberately deconstructs its own formality — clinical observation tipping repeatedly into visceral disorder
Unusually low for a literary novel