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.”
Character Analysis
A French historian in his thirties, solitary, intelligent, and undergoing a perceptual crisis that is also a philosophical awakening. Roquentin is not a hero — he does not act, he witnesses. His defining characteristic is a kind of ruthless intellectual honesty that prevents him from adopting the comforting fictions available to him. By the end of the novel he has abandoned his career, his relationship, and his social world. He is left with the possibility — not the certainty — of writing something. Sartre uses him to dramatize what authentic existence costs.
Educated, precise, drawing on philosophical and literary reference — but the education is in the process of failing him. His vocabulary includes Husserl and Heidegger but cannot describe what is happening to him.