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.”
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Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre (1938) · 253pages · Modernist / Existentialist · 3 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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 b...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Formally educated prose that deliberately deconstructs its own formality — clinical observation tipping repeatedly into visceral disorder
Narrator: Roquentin narrates in the present tense of a diary, which means the narrator and the protagonist are temporally conti...
Figurative Language: Unusually low for a literary novel
Historical Context
France in the late 1930s — the period between the wars, the rise of fascism, the Popular Front: The Self-Taught Man's humanism is not merely a philosophical position but a historically specific one — the belief in human progress and brotherhood that the 1930s was systematically destroying. Sa...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Why does Sartre use the diary form rather than third-person narration? What would be lost if Roquentin's story were told by an omniscient narrator looking back?
- Roquentin's nausea begins with physical objects — a pebble, a door handle. Why physical objects? Why not, say, other people, or social institutions, or abstract ideas?
- The chestnut tree root is black, massive, and knotted. Roquentin spends pages on it. Why this object in particular? What about the root makes it the novel's central existentialist image?
- The Self-Taught Man loves all human beings 'unconditionally.' Roquentin finds this monstrous. Is he right? Can you love something unconditionally without it being a form of bad faith?
- Anny's theory of 'perfect moments' is an attempt to redeem contingent experience through aesthetic staging. Is this essentially different from Roquentin's final resolution to write a novel?
Notable Quotes
“The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearly — let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even...”
“Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But ...”
“I see my hand spread on the table. It lives — it is me. It opens, the fingers open and point. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat belly. I...”
Why Read This
Because Nausea performs philosophy rather than teaching it — you do not read about the experience of contingency, you have it. The chestnut root scene takes fifteen minutes to read and fifteen years to understand. If you have ever felt that the wo...