La Nausée is a novel by Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1938 while he was a college professor. It is one of Sartre's best-known novels.

The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.

It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. They said he was recognized, "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a farreaching influence on our age." Sartre was one of the few people to ever decline the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.

In her La Force de l'Âge (The Prime of Life - 1960), French writer Simone de Beauvoir claims that that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.

It was translated into English by Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964).

Plot Summary

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Fresh from several years of travel, 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin settles in the French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932 a "sweetish sickness" he calls nausea increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys -- his research project, the company of "The Self-Taught Man" who is reading all the books in the library alphabetically, a pleasant physical relationship with a cafe owner named Francoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved ... even his own hands and the beauty of nature. Over time, his disgust towards existence forces him into near-insanity, self-hatred, and finally a revelation into the nature of his being. Antoine is facing the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself; he embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.

Philosophy

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La Nausée serves primarily as a vehicle for Sartre to explain his philosophy in simplified terms. Roquentin is the classic existentialist hero, whose attempts to pierce the veil of existence lead him to a strange combination of disgust and wonder. For the first part of the novel, Roquentin has flashes of nausea that emanate from mundane objects. These flashes appear seemingly randomly, from staring at a crumpled piece of paper in the gutter to picking up a rock on the beach. The feeling he perceives is pure disgust: a contempt so refined that it almost shatters his mind each time it occurs. As the novel progresses, the nausea appears more and more frequently, though he is still unsure of what it actually signifies. However, at the base of a chesnut tree in a park, he receives a piercingly clear vision of what the nausea actually is. Existence itself, the property of existents to be something rather than nothing, was what was slowly driving him mad. He no longer sees objects as having qualities such as color or shape. Instead, all words are separated from the thing itself, and he is confronted with pure being. Coupled with this concept is the idea of absurdity.

French novels | 1938 novels | Philosophical novels

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