Novel: Nausea

Overview
Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea is a first-person diary of Antoine Roquentin, an isolated intellectual living in the fictional French port town of Bouville. As he tries to finish a historical study of an 18th-century aristocrat, the Marquis de Rollebon, Roquentin is seized by intermittent waves of “nausea,” a visceral, metaphysical revulsion that accompanies his realization of the sheer contingency and superfluity of existence. The book traces how this unsettling perception erodes his attachment to people, projects, and social roles, culminating in a tentative resolution through art.

Form and Setting
The narrative takes the form of dated journal entries, giving the prose a confessional, episodic texture. Bouville, a thinly veiled Le Havre, is rendered with documentary precision, streets, cafés, parks, library, but the town’s bourgeois routines and civic monuments become uncanny under Roquentin’s gaze. The diary format lets Sartre modulate between concrete, sensory observation and philosophical reflection, dramatizing how abstractions erupt from the most ordinary scenes.

Plot and Characters
Roquentin has been living off a modest income while researching Rollebon’s papers. The project, intended to confer purpose and coherence, begins to feel hollow. He notes that the documents are contradictory, that the past yields only shifting appearances rather than a stable essence. As the nausea intensifies, triggered by objects like a slippery pebble, a glass of beer, or, most famously, the squirming root of a chestnut tree, he experiences the world as gratuitous presence, overflowing what his concepts can contain.

Two recurring figures focus his social encounters. The Autodidact, a well-meaning regular at the municipal library, reads systematically through the stacks and professes a bland, universal humanism. His faith that culture improves the soul collapses when he is publicly disgraced after a furtive sexual advance toward a young man, exposing the fragility and self-deception of his idealism. Anny, Roquentin’s former lover, returns for a visit. She once believed in orchestrating “perfect moments,” small formal unities that gave life an aesthetic shape. Now disenchanted and restless, she refuses to rekindle their past. Their farewell underscores Roquentin’s inability to find meaning in romance or memory.

Roquentin abandons the Rollebon book, recognizing that historical narrative cannot secure his being. He wanders cafés and the museum, where pompous portraits of Bouville’s notables exemplify the complacent bad faith of the town. In a bar he repeatedly plays a scratched record of an American jazz song; its closed form and necessity seem to give the singer’s sorrow a luminous rightness his own life lacks. This experience suggests a different path forward.

Themes and Ideas
Sartre stages the existential insight that existence precedes essence not as a theorem but as a bodily shock. Objects lose their familiar names and uses, revealing a dense, indifferent thereness. From this disclosure follow alienation, freedom, and responsibility. Without inherited meanings to lean on, Roquentin confronts the burden of choosing a project that will confer form. The Autodidact’s collapse parodies naïve humanism; Anny’s “perfect moments” anticipate the novel’s closing wager on art. Art, unlike history or love in the novel, can transform contingency by imposing form without denying the raw abundance of being.

Style and Legacy
Sartre fuses phenomenological description with caustic satire and lyrical eruptions. The chestnut-root passage is the emblem: a sensory epiphany that becomes ontology. The final pages suggest Roquentin might write a novel that will justify his existence as the song justifies the singer’s. Nausea thus ends not with consolation but with a project, sketching the existential move from lucidity to creation that would shape Sartre’s later philosophy and literature.