Nausea

Plot and Narrative Form

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (La Nausée) is a philosophical novel first published in 1938 and written in the form of a personal diary. The narrator, Antoine Roquentin, is a solitary historian living in the fictional French town of Bouville. He is working on a biographical study of an 18th‑century aristocrat, the Marquis de Rollebon, but gradually loses interest in both his project and the ordinary structures that used to anchor his life.

The narrative traces Roquentin’s increasingly disorienting experiences of “nausea,” episodes in which everyday objects and situations appear strangely alien, excessive, or oppressively present. A famous example occurs when he observes the roots of a chestnut tree in a park and is overwhelmed by their raw, contingent existence. These experiences undermine his taken‑for‑granted sense of meaning and identity. He becomes estranged from his past relationship with Anny, from casual acquaintances such as the Autodidact, and from his own professional ambitions.

The diary form allows readers to follow, in detail, Roquentin’s shifting moods, reflections, and interpretations. Rather than a tightly plotted story, Nausea is structured around scenes of perception and reflection, culminating in Roquentin’s tentative decision to devote himself to creating a work of art—an aesthetic project that might, he hopes, confer a form of style or necessity onto an otherwise contingent existence.

Central Philosophical Themes

Nausea dramatizes several themes that later became hallmarks of existentialist thought:

1. Contingency and Facticity
   Roquentin’s nausea stems from the experience that beings “are there,” without reason or justification. Everything appears radically contingent: it could just as well not have existed. The brute “thereness” of objects and his own body reveals what Sartre later calls facticity, the inescapable “given” elements of one’s situation. The novel contrasts this raw contingency with human attempts to impose narratives, categories, and functions that make the world appear necessary or ordered.

2. Alienation and the Breakdown of the Everyday
   The protagonist’s ordinary ways of relating to people and things lose their familiarity. The names of objects seem arbitrary; social roles appear hollow; and conventional values—such as respectability or professional success—no longer grip him. The alienation depicted is not only social but ontological: Roquentin is estranged from being itself, experiencing it as excessive and opaque.

3. Freedom, Responsibility, and Anxiety
   As Roquentin comes to see that there is no pre‑given essence determining his life, he encounters the unsettling dimension of freedom. In the absence of a metaphysical foundation or divine plan, he recognizes that he is responsible for the meaning of his existence. This recognition contributes to his nausea and a form of anxiety akin to what philosophers such as Kierkegaard had earlier described. The novel thus presents freedom less as liberation than as a burdensome exposure to choice without guarantees.

4. Nothingness and the Collapse of Essence
   Throughout the text, Roquentin discovers a kind of nothingness at the heart of meanings and identities. Categories such as “writer,” “lover,” or “citizen” fail to capture the full reality of existence. The gap between these conceptual frameworks and the overflow of actual experience suggests that any essence we ascribe to ourselves or to objects is fragile and potentially illusory. Although Sartre’s later technical vocabulary is not yet in place, the novel foreshadows his idea that consciousness introduces nothingness into the world of being.

5. Art, Aesthetic Experience, and Transcendence
   Music, and specifically the recurring jazz song “Some of These Days,” plays a crucial role in the narrative. Roquentin is briefly consoled and fascinated by the form and necessity he perceives in the song, in contrast to the chaos of raw existence. By the novel’s end, he speculates that writing a novel himself could transform the senselessness of life into a coherent, if artificial, pattern. This raises philosophical questions about whether art can provide a non‑illusory mode of transcendence or whether it merely overlays contingency with human design.

Relation to Sartre’s Philosophy

Nausea precedes but closely anticipates Sartre’s major philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). Many readers treat the novel as a literary introduction to ideas later formulated in more systematic terms.

• The experience of nausea corresponds to what Sartre will describe as the encounter with “being‑in‑itself”—dense, contingent, and without reason.
• Roquentin’s reflective self‑awareness anticipates “being‑for‑itself”, consciousness as a nothingness that distances itself from what it is.
• The breakdown of conventional roles and narratives foreshadows Sartre’s analyses of bad faith, in which individuals hide their freedom behind fixed identities.

Scholars differ on how to interpret the relation between the novel and the later philosophy. Some argue that Nausea offers a phenomenological description of lived experience that remains valid independently of Sartre’s subsequent theoretical framework. Others see it as an early, somewhat dramatized expression of concepts that would later be refined and, in some respects, revised. Debates also concern the status of Roquentin’s final turn to art: whether Sartre endorses this as a genuine resolution or presents it as one more, perhaps aesthetically elevated, attempt to evade the full implications of contingency.

Reception and Influence

Upon its publication, Nausea was recognized as a distinctive and unsettling work, though its prewar reception was more limited than Sartre’s later fame might suggest. After the Second World War, as existentialism became a prominent intellectual and cultural movement, the novel gained wide readership and was often cited as a paradigmatic existentialist novel.

Historically, Nausea has been significant for several reasons:

• It helped popularize existential themes, reaching audiences beyond technical philosophy.
• It influenced subsequent writers and thinkers interested in alienation, modernity, and the crisis of meaning, including figures in French literature and later postwar European thought.
• It contributed to philosophical discussions of literature as a mode of philosophical inquiry, raising questions about whether narrative and first‑person description can disclose aspects of existence not easily captured in formal argument.

Critics have offered diverse assessments. Some praise the work for its phenomenological precision and for capturing, in concrete scenes, the destabilizing experience of confronting contingency. Others contend that the novel overstates the bleakness of existence or underestimates forms of meaning grounded in social practices, relationships, or political engagement. Feminist and postcolonial critics have further examined the novel’s focus on a relatively isolated male intellectual, questioning its claims to represent a universal human condition.

Despite such debates, Nausea remains a central text in the study of 20th‑century philosophy and literature, frequently read alongside Sartre’s essays and treatises as a key expression of existential concerns about freedom, responsibility, and the precariousness of meaning.