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.”
About Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was born in Paris, studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and spent a formative year in Berlin in 1933-34 studying Husserl and Heidegger's phenomenology. Nausea was written during this period and published in 1938, when Sartre was 32. The novel was turned down by several publishers, finally accepted by Gallimard with editorial encouragement from the novelist and thinker Jean Paulhan. It was an immediate critical success. Sartre drew directly on his experience of Le Havre (where he taught philosophy) for Bouville, and on his own experience of depersonalization and alienation from objects for Roquentin's nausea. The decisive philosophical influences were Husserl's phenomenology and Heidegger's Being and Time, both encountered in Berlin.
Life → Text Connections
How Jean-Paul Sartre's real experiences shaped specific elements of Nausea.
Sartre spent a year in Berlin studying Husserl's phenomenology, particularly the concept of intentionality — consciousness as always directed toward objects
Roquentin's experience of objects losing their familiar intentional structure — ceasing to be tools and becoming alien presences — is a direct phenomenological experiment
The novel is philosophy enacted rather than described. Sartre is testing what happens when Husserlian intentionality breaks down.
Sartre taught in Le Havre (fictionalized as Bouville) and experienced the provincial French city as isolated, conformist, and oppressive
The portraits of Bouville's bourgeoisie — the Sunday promenaders, the statues of the city's founders, the museum of worthies — are savage satire of provincial self-satisfaction
The setting is not neutral. Bouville embodies the bad faith of a society that has arranged itself to never have to confront contingency.
Sartre had a long-term relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, which was radically non-conventional and involved painful separations and third parties
The Anny relationship — intense, intellectual, defined by shared private projects, ultimately irreconcilable — echoes the tensions of Sartre's actual emotional life
Anny's theory of perfect moments is Beauvoir's kind of thinking; the failure of the theory is Sartre's honest accounting of what his philosophical discoveries cost.
Sartre was writing his major philosophical work Being and Nothingness simultaneously with and after Nausea
Nausea works through the central distinctions of Being and Nothingness — being-in-itself vs. being-for-itself, bad faith, contingency, the pour-soi's anxiety — in fictional form before theorizing them systematically
The novel and the philosophy are not illustration and thesis. They are parallel attempts to arrive at the same insights by different routes. The novel's insights are sometimes clearer than the philosophy's.
Historical Era
France in the late 1930s — the period between the wars, the rise of fascism, the Popular Front
How the Era Shapes the Book
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. Sartre watched European humanists fail to stop fascism and drew the conclusion that humanist ideology was not just philosophically weak but politically dangerous: it substituted a love of 'Man in the abstract' for the harder work of engaging with actual situations. Nausea's attack on humanism is inseparable from the historical context in which humanism was failing.