Nausea

Nausea (1938)

Author: Jean-Paul Sartre · 1938 La Nausée

Plot Summary

Antoine Roquentin is a thirty-year-old solitary intellectual living in a gloomy French port town called Bouville (a thinly disguised Le Havre). He has no job and no friends; he subsists on a private income while researching a biography of an eighteenth-century diplomat, the Marquis de Rollebon. He spends his days in the public library, his evenings in a café where he’s having a half-hearted affair with the owner, and much of the rest of his time alone in his hotel room.

The novel is his diary. The diary begins because something strange has started to happen. Ordinary objects are behaving oddly. He picks up a pebble on the beach and has to drop it; he feels a kind of sickening pressure in his hand. Later it’s a glass of beer, then his own face in the mirror, then the handle of a door. Things are losing their names. He can’t quite see them as “objects for use” anymore — they just are, massive and unjustified, pressing on him. He names the sensation “the Nausea.”

As the diary progresses, three things happen in parallel. First, the Nausea intensifies. Second, Roquentin grows estranged from the town’s bourgeoisie, whom he begins to observe with increasing contempt — most savagely in the Bouville portrait gallery, where the self-satisfied faces of the town’s leaders come to embody what Sartre will later call bad faith: the illusion that one has an inherent “right” to exist. Third, his historical research collapses. He realizes he cannot reconstruct Rollebon. The past is unreachable. He abandons the biography.

The climax comes in a public park. Roquentin sits on a bench and stares at the black, knotty root of a chestnut tree. The ordinary categories — “root,” “tree,” “plant” — drop away. He sees the root as it simply is: a naked, nameless, senseless mass of existence. And he has a revelation: nothing has a reason to be. Existence is contingency. Everything — the root, the park, the town, his own body, his own life, his own future death — is de trop, superfluous, in the way, existing for no reason and justified by nothing.

After this, the few ties he has left begin to snap. He rejects the Self-Taught Man, a pathetic autodidact who believes in an abstract, sentimental humanism. He travels to Paris to see Anny, his former lover, and discovers that she has reached a similar desolation from a different angle: her lifelong search for “perfect moments” has collapsed, and she too has nothing left.

Completely isolated, Roquentin decides to leave Bouville for good. In a café on his last evening, he listens to a jazz record — “Some of These Days” — and in its clean, hard, mathematical phrasing he glimpses something that contingent existence doesn’t have: necessity, form, a kind of being that is not in the way. He decides to write a novel. Not history, not biography — a work of pure imagination, “beautiful and hard as steel,” that might justify a life the way the melody justifies itself.

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The Argument in One Paragraph

Nausea is the novelistic dramatization of Sartre’s later philosophical thesis that existence precedes essence. Roquentin’s slow metaphysical horror is the phenomenological discovery, lived from the inside, that objects and human beings exist without any pre-ordained reason or purpose — that the world is not a cosmos but a pile, contingent, de trop, superfluous. The bourgeoisie’s confident belief that they have a right to exist is the original bad faith. The only honest response is to acknowledge contingency without flinching; the one narrow escape hatch, tentatively proposed at the end, is aesthetic creation — a work of art rigorous enough to impose the necessity that life itself doesn’t have.

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What the Novel Is About

Nausea is Sartre’s first major book, written in his early thirties and published in 1938, five years before [[being-and-nothingness|Being and Nothingness]]. Almost every concept of the later philosophy is here already, but lived through by a character rather than defined in a treatise. The novel is a phenomenological experiment in fiction: can you make a reader experience contingency, rather than just understand the word?

The central phenomenon is the Nausea itself. Sartre is careful that it is not, primarily, a metaphor. It is a physical sensation — a “sweetish sickness” in the hands, in the stomach, behind the eyes — that arises when Roquentin’s ordinary relationship to objects breaks down. When I pick up a doorknob, I don’t usually see it as a brute chunk of matter; I see it as a tool, a thing-for-opening-doors, part of the human-furnished world. Sartre’s word for that pre-given framework of use and meaning is the same word Heidegger uses: Zuhandenheit, readiness-to-hand. The Nausea is what happens when that framework fails. The doorknob is no longer for anything. It is just — there. Massive. Naked. Unjustified. And once you see one object that way, you start seeing them all that way, including your own body and your own life.

The chestnut-root scene is the famous case. But the whole novel is preparing it. The pebble on the beach; the glass of beer; Roquentin’s inability to recognize his own face in the mirror; the tramway seat that suddenly refuses to be “a seat” and reverts to a “dead donkey” bloated with red plush — these are phenomenological exercises, each one chipping away at the pre-given world until the chestnut root can arrive as the naked underlying reality.

The philosophical payoff is the concept Sartre will spend his career developing: contingency. To exist is not to exist for a reason, it is simply to be there. Things don’t follow from other things; they just pile up, one after another, de trop. And once you see this, you cannot unsee it. You cannot believe, in the old way, that the world is a cosmos ordered by a divine plan, or a rational system, or even a coherent human project. It’s just — stuff, there, for nothing.

The novel also introduces what will become Sartre’s sharpest social critique. The town’s bourgeoisie live in what he will later call bad faith. They believe, unreflectively, that they ought to exist, that their position and their property and their respectability give them a right to a place in the world. The Bouville museum, with its portraits of dead dignitaries staring down in gilded frames, is where Sartre lets this illusion have it most mercilessly. Their certainty is the exact opposite of Roquentin’s Nausea — and Sartre is quietly clear about which of the two is closer to the truth.

The other set piece is the encounter with the Self-Taught Man, a shy, pathetic autodidact working through the library’s books in alphabetical order, and convinced he has discovered humanism as a kind of private religion. Sartre’s treatment of him is ambivalent — there is real pity, and a kind of horror at what he’s about to become (in the late chapters he is publicly humiliated and exposed as a pederast). But philosophically, the Self-Taught Man is there to embody another version of bad faith: the abstract love of “Man-with-a-capital-M” as a substitute for actually looking at what individual existence is.

And then, at the end, the jazz melody. This is the one opening out of the book. The song — a real tune, Sophie Tucker’s “Some of These Days” — is the first thing in the novel that Roquentin does not experience as contingent. It has form. It is necessary in the way a mathematical proof is necessary. Each note follows from the last. Nothing in it is de trop. It does not exist in the heavy sense things exist; it is. From this, Roquentin imagines — tentatively, without guarantees — that perhaps a human being could also make something like that. A novel. Not a history (he has just given up on Rollebon). Not a memoir. An invention rigorous enough to stand outside contingency. The book ends with him leaving Bouville and, maybe, beginning.

Key Concepts

• Nausea (la nausée). A physical sensation that is also an ontological revelation: the breakdown of the human framework of meanings, leaving objects visible as brute, unjustified presences. “The Nausea has not left me… it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.”
• Contingency (contingence). The absolute lack of necessity or reason for being; “a perfect free gift.” Roquentin’s discovery in the park, the philosophical core of the book.
• De trop (superfluous, in the way). The technical term for contingent existence. Things are de trop because nothing requires them to be. Roquentin eventually realizes he himself is de trop — his life and even his death have no built-in justification.
• Bad faith / the “Bastards” (les Salauds). The bourgeoisie’s self-satisfied conviction that they deserve to exist. The social form of the metaphysical illusion. Sartre will theorize this later; here it’s just savagely drawn.
• Adventures / perfect moments. The consoling narrative structures we retroactively impose on our lives — the sense that experience has shape, climax, meaning. Anny shares Roquentin’s diagnosis that these are retroactive fictions: “You have to choose: live or tell.”
• The jazz melody as aesthetic redemption. Not an answer to contingency, but a glimpse of a mode of being — formal, necessary, self-justifying — that contingent life cannot have. The basis of the book’s tentative closing turn toward art.

Key Quotations

1. “The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity.” — the thesis, delivered at the root of the chestnut tree.
2. “To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them.” — existence is brute, not rational.
3. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.” — the book’s bluntest summary of the human (and every other) condition.
4. “I, too, was In the way.” — the self-recognition that Roquentin is not watching the absurd from a safe distance; he is part of it.
5. “I am in the midst of things, nameless things.” — the collapse of language.
6. “Things are divorced from their names.” — the mechanics of the Nausea.
7. “You have to choose: live or tell.” — on the incompatibility of narrative form and lived experience.
8. “Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all.” — the refusal of the story-structured life.
9. “The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will leave me soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.” — the turning point, the acceptance.
10. “It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence… . A book. A novel.” — the last line’s tentative opening onto salvation through form.

Symbols and Set Pieces

Image	What it signals	Where
The chestnut tree root	Brute, unjustified existence — the in-itself stripped of every human category. The central revelation scene.	Public park, the climax.
The museum portraits (les Salauds)	Bourgeois bad faith; the belief that one has a right to exist.	Roquentin’s visit to the Bouville gallery.
The jazz record (“Some of These Days”)	Aesthetic necessity; a form of being that is not de trop. The one exit.	The café, in the closing pages.
The pebble and the glass of beer	The first intrusions of contingency into everyday objects.	Opening diary entries.
Anny’s “perfect moments”	The narrative fiction that an individual life could be structured like a story.	Roquentin’s Paris visit.

How It’s Written

First-person, diary format, present tense, with editor’s-note framing that pretends the manuscript was found and published posthumously (a familiar nineteenth-century device repurposed for phenomenology). The form is load-bearing: because existence is contingent — a pile of disjointed moments without a shape — the diary’s fragmented, dated, not-quite-ordered structure is the content. A traditional third-person novel would smuggle back in the narrative necessity the novel is trying to dismantle.

The tone alternates between clinical phenomenological observation (“I pick up the pebble. It is cold. I turn it over. It presses a little against my hand”) and passages of intense, almost Rilkean lyricism (the chestnut root, the Bouville skyline at twilight, the jazz record). The polemical sections — the museum, the Self-Taught Man’s humiliation — have a savagery that belongs more to Céline than to Flaubert.

Who He’s Arguing With

• Bourgeois humanism. The belief that human dignity is a self-evident given. Sartre thinks it’s the opposite: self-evident only to those who refuse to look.
• The religious and metaphysical traditions that treat existence as purposeful, ordered, meaningful. The novel is a long argument that the world is none of these things.
• Traditional realist fiction. By framing a novel as a diary that breaks down its own narrative coherence, Sartre is also attacking the novelistic conventions that make ordinary reality feel “storied” and therefore reasonable.

Connections

• Sartre — this is the novelistic first draft of everything he will theorize in Being and Nothingness and popularize in Existentialism Is a Humanism.
• Dostoevsky — the most important literary ancestor. The Underground Man is Roquentin’s direct ancestor: same solitude, same alienation from the respectable world, same obsessive diary-keeping, same refusal to accept the consoling illusions of society.
• Kafka — Kafka’s world is Nausea’s cousin: objects that have lost their function, bureaucracies that have lost their reason, protagonists who cannot find the thread that connects them to the rest of reality. Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis is Roquentin’s Nausea given a different physical form.
• Kant — Sartre inherits, and then violates, the Kantian framework. Kant said we can never know the thing-in-itself; we’re stuck in a world shaped by our categories. In the park, Roquentin has the horrifying experience of the categories failing — and glimpsing, or thinking he glimpses, the in-itself directly. It’s the one revelation Kant’s system says should be impossible.
• Schopenhauer — the pessimist predecessor Sartre rarely names but inherits through the air. Schopenhauer had already identified the thing-in-itself as blind, aimless Will; Roquentin’s chestnut root is the twentieth-century phenomenological update of the same discovery, minus the metaphysics of the Will but keeping the horror.
• Freud — the great absent antagonist. [[being-and-nothingness|Being and Nothingness]] will devote a chapter to demolishing the Freudian unconscious in the name of bad faith; Nausea is where the dispute begins. Roquentin’s “I am my past, I am my future” rejects the Freudian picture of a self divided against itself in advance.

Lineage

• Predecessors: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Schopenhauer’s [[the-world-as-will-and-representation|World as Will]] (the pessimist metaphysics minus the Will itself), Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, and phenomenologically Husserl and Heidegger — whose method Sartre is adapting into literature.
• Successors: Camus’s The Stranger (1942) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) — Camus reviewed Nausea and the influence is open. The French nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute. Beckett’s post-war prose. The wider twentieth-century tradition of novels that take phenomenology seriously as fiction’s subject.