Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Summary
Antoine Roquentin, a historian living alone in the fictional port town of Bouville, keeps a diary while researching the life of an obscure eighteenth century nobleman, and the diary gradually stops being about his research and starts recording a strange physical revulsion he cannot name at first. It settles on ordinary objects, most famously the gnarled root of a chestnut tree in a public park, where Roquentin is suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer, unjustified fact that the root, and everything else, simply exists without any reason for existing at all. Sartre gives this feeling a name, nausea, and lets it spread from the tree root to Roquentin's own hands and eventually to the idea of his own body sitting in a chair.
Around this central crisis, Sartre gives Roquentin two failed alternatives to compare himself against. The Self Taught Man, a bailiff's clerk working through the public library in strict alphabetical order, believes education and humanist ideals can still give life meaning, a faith Roquentin watches curdle into public humiliation by the novel's end. Anny, a former lover Roquentin still hopes might rescue him, returns briefly, tells him she has given up her own old search for what she once called perfect moments, and leaves again for London, taking with her the last conventional escape the novel offers him.
Roquentin considers suicide and rejects it as just another contingent, meaningless act, no different from the existence it would supposedly end. Instead the novel closes with him deciding to write, not history this time but an invented story, on the theory that only something frankly imaginary might let him stand outside the nausea he cannot argue his way out of. It reads as a diary rather than a conventional novel, philosophy arriving as lived symptom rather than argument, and it suits a reader willing to sit inside real dread rather than have it explained away.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Jean-Paul Sartre the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature for work rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, and Sartre refused it. He wrote to the Swedish Academy asking to be withdrawn from consideration before the announcement, and when the letter arrived too late, he explained himself publicly, arguing that a writer should never let himself be turned into an institution and objecting that the prize, in practice, had gone mostly to writers from the West or to dissidents from the East. He is one of only two people ever to decline a Nobel Prize outright.
Nausea, published in French in 1938 after his publisher Gaston Gallimard talked him out of the title Melancholia, taken from Dürer's engraving, had already made his name as a novelist a generation before the Nobel arrived; Albert Camus reviewed it favorably, and the philosopher William Barrett later called it the book where Sartre the thinker and Sartre the novelist come closest to being one writer. The Swedish Academy still lists Sartre among its laureates despite his refusal, since the prize cannot be withdrawn once announced.