How long is sartres nausea

To live? A rare thing, indeed. Oh dear, I sound like a self-help author. This was the first time I read Sartre. I've read the brilliant, the one and only, the master at describing the human condition, Dostoevsky; Camus, whose works I really like too; Kierkegaard, the pioneer. So, Sartre was a must-read. Those authors speak right to my soul wherever that is , they get me well, not Kierkegaard; at least, not that much.

It's complicated. We're cool, though. It's a comforting feeling So, I loved this book. It's a new favorite of mine.

And I need some Seinfeld reruns now. Note to self: if you're ever going to re-read this, don't do it while listening to Enya, Craig Armstrong or Joy Division. It wasn't a nice feeling. View all 67 comments. Jul 11, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: french , 20th-century , books , philosophy , literature , fiction.

It is Sartre's first novel and, in his opinion, one of his best works. Antoine Roquentin protagonist of the novel, is a former adventurer who has been living in Bouville for three years.

Antoine does not keep in touch with family, and has no friends. He settles in the fictional French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure.

Antoine does not think highly of himself: "The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. He eventually starts to think he does not even exist: "My existence was beginning to cause me some concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination? View all 6 comments. Sep 17, Fergus rated it it was amazing. But like me at my coming of age, he covered up its huge insights into his own failings behind a Facade of Self-Deception.

In this book, Sartre saw correctly that our world is Crazy Sick. But by sidestepping the problem of his own sickness through Reason, he made it worse for himself. And in the end he died of it. We all need Help. Don't get me wrong. I think nausea IS the only authentic reaction to modern life. Its hypocrisy sickens, of course - and Sartre is at least right in that.

Gotta bite the bullet. The other day, I decided to skim this novel again, after so many years had passed since I read it, and was thunderstruck. Because it describes exactly the same experience I had 50 years ago! It was Crazy Sickness. Sartre, ever the pessimistic atheist, thought it was the perception of the nothingness of middle-class values.

Eliot says some people have the experience and miss the meaning. Many are called but few are chosen. So most folks, perhaps, prize this epiphany in their memory for the rest of their lives but are not fundamentally changed by it. And to see results after such a satori, hard work must follow. And I wrestled with it, as I say, for 50 years. It was a long, cold, hard slog. Until, finally, peace and freedom ensued. But Roquentin - Sartre - just endured its temporary internal pressure for a while, and then continued toward pure futility on his angry, counter cultural way.

With great anguish. You know, it always happens in exactly this way. The result is earthshaking for poor, nondescript Roquentin! He, like unlucky Prometheus, has suddenly and shamefacedly stolen Fire from the gods. But Roquentin grabbed the stick by the Wrong end.

Where truth lies now is in unending aporia A similar thing happened to me when I was a kid. It was pivotal in my development and in my choices as an adult. I had to choose, and fast! I submitted myself to His Absolute Alterity. At least at first You know, Kafka once wrote a paragraph or two in his notebooks on the Prometheus parable, which describes the anguish that must follow such an experience for us all.

That merging is our return to Wholeness. It is painfully and near-impossibly difficult. But that is the Path. And it is the Path to our Freedom and Wholeness. One hundred years before Sartre penned this novel, a great Dane suffered the same cataclysmic bifurcation of his being - and, at first, the same unutterable anguish. For him it led to Wholeness too. But - crucially, and in stark contradistinction to Sartre - Kierkegaard found blessed release from it in the end. Sporadically at first, but you can see final freedom was there.

You can see his solution in his short masterwork Fear and Trembling Through a series of subtle and cuttingly double-edged variations on the old, old story of Abraham and Isaac - the original sacrifice - he lays the immovable foundation of Postmodernist Christian Faith.

Seen from almost every possible type of viewpoint out of a myriad range of possibilities. And his ineluctable inner logic overpowered all his naysayers. In fact Fear and Trembling paved the way for such modern cutting-edge Christians as Karl Barth and Hans Kung, both the brains trust and the conscientious soul of our new 21st century churches - institutions that seem to the untrained eye to be so out of touch.

Just try to look at it all a bit deeper! For the choice we can make, right now, is for Real Inner Peace. The peace of a painfully and patiently stoic Promethean Rock Which must appear also to be in this ugly world, for so many of us, the Transcendence of a troubled Cross. And that way Works. View all 26 comments. The protagonist is a captive of loneliness and time. This sun and blue sky were only a snare. This is the hundredth time I've let myself be caught.

My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves. For him there are no expectations and no changes in life… The world passes him by… I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little… So the protagonist becomes nauseated with reality and his purposeless existence turns The protagonist is a captive of loneliness and time.

For him there are no expectations and no changes in life… The world passes him by… I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little… So the protagonist becomes nauseated with reality and his purposeless existence turns into a mental torment. I was just thinking that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.

There is a paradox though: Why bother? If existence is meaningless then any philosophy is useless… View all 3 comments. Aug 16, Glenn Russell added it. Going back to my college days, my reading of this work has always been decidedly personal. Thus my observations below and, at points, my own experiences relating to certain passages I have found to contain great power.

I no longer knew where I was; I saw the colors spin slowly around me, I wanted to vomit. Roquentin's Nausea his capital isn't occasional or a revulsion to anything specific, the smell of a certain room or being in the presence of a particular group of people; no, his Nausea is all pervasive: life in all of its various manifestations nauseates him.

Like Roquentin, I wanted to vomit. When the other players ran out to take the field, I remained seated. Then, calmly walking over to the equipment room, I turned in my uniform and pads. When I walked away I felt as if I shed an ugly layer of skin, a repugnant old self. I felt clearheaded and refreshed; I had a vivid sense of instant transformation. I can imagine Roquentin in a somewhat similar plight but, unfortunately, there's no escape.

He's the prisoner of an impossible situation: all of life, every bit of it, gives him his Nausea. The scenery changes, people come in and out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable monotonous addition. It didn't matter what time the clock said on the wall - all the hours were a dull, humdrum grey. When I left the office: a great sense of freedom and release.

I am at the end of the Rue Tournebride. Shall I cross and go up the street on the other side? I think I have had enough: I have seen enough pink skulls, thin, distinguished and faded countenances. The scene was grim, the vast majority of men and women having a hangdog, beaten down look. I was ready to leave. Roquintin has this feeling not only at the end of the day - he has it all the time. I shouldn't complain: all I wanted was to be free. In many ways Roquintin is like Pablo from Sartre's short story The Wall where Pablo feels being in his body is like being tied to an enormous vermin.

No wonder Roquintin feels the Nausea. In this I'm in agreement with the novel's protagonist - I find such people overbearing. I was once in conversation with an older person who actually told me, as a way of discounting my position on a political matter: "You have to live a little," all the while hitting the scotch bottle. Curiously, a few years later, thanks mainly to all the scotch, this know-it-all was in very bad shape. I maintained a noble silence. I didn't dare; I went on.

Doors of houses frightened me especially. I was afraid they would open of themselves. I ended by walking in the middle of the street. Now it was inscribed on the paper, it sides against me. I didn't recognize it any more. It was there, in front of me; in vain for me to trace some sign of origin. Anyone could have written it. I would have had to lean over or bend my knees. I was no longer surprised that he held up his nose so impetuously: the destiny of these small men is always working itself out a few inches about their head.

Admirable power of art. From this shrill-voiced manikin, nothing would pass on to posterity same a threatening face, a superb gesture and the bloodshot eyes of a bull. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. How many people are trapped in their own thinking, continually reliving painful episodes of their past?

Roquintin is one such example in the extreme. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things. All inanimate objects and situations are encroaching on what he perceives his intellectual and spiritual freedom. Does Nausea sound disturbing?

I strongly suspect this is exactly Jean-Paul Sartre's intent. Jean-Paul Sartre, , French philosopher and author of a number of classic works of literature. View all 13 comments. Third time lucky I have always preferred the work of Albert Camus when it comes to the subject of 'existentialism'. It has taken me three attempts to read Nausea to finally appreciate. Whereas I just found Camus easier to digest immediately.

This small novel is no doubt an important work and essential reading for philosophical purposes. I remember reading Camus's 'The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea back to back, similar in some ways, not in others, The Stranger lingered for weeks, Nausea drifted Third time lucky I remember reading Camus's 'The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea back to back, similar in some ways, not in others, The Stranger lingered for weeks, Nausea drifted away.

But for whatever reason, this time around things just clicked. Maybe it helped reading 'The Age of Reason' to finally grasp him, the fact I am a fan of Simone de Beauvoir should mean looking at Sartre in a better light, after all he took her under his wing during her creative days at university.

They enjoyed each others company, and this goes to show men and women can become great friends without becoming lovers. Kafka always questioned the meaning of life. Sartre only questions the fact of existence, which is an order of reality much more immediate than the human and social elaborations of the life that is on this side of life. It is a question here of nothing but the spiritual results of solitude.

They are analyzed with a rigor of thought and expression that will no doubt seem intolerable to most readers. Now I see the light, a philosophical novelist of the first order. Since Voltaire, we know that in France the philosophical novel has been a light genre, not far from the fable. The law of the man who is rigorously alone is not the fear of nothingness, but the fear of existence.

This discovery takes us far. If his first novel was a work without a solution, by which I mean that it no more opens up any solutions for the universe than the principal works of Dostoevsky, it would perhaps be a singular success without a successor.

Jean-Paul Sartre who throughout the novel paints a portrait of a great bourgeois city of social caricature, and has gifts as a novelist that are too precise and too cruel not to result in great denunciations, not to completely open up into reality, a reality I would rather not see. A seminal work that I will come to appreciate even more over the space of time.

View all 15 comments. Aug 18, Jon Nakapalau rated it it was amazing Shelves: philosophy , classics. Ogier P.

Nausea places us in a situation where we have to ask ourselves: is knowledge for the sake of knowledge a wise way to spend your life; or can you have knowledge of trivial facts e. Aug 19, Jim Fonseca rated it really liked it Shelves: philosophy , psychological-novel , french-authors.

Wikipedia calls the novel one of the canonical works of existentialism. The main character is Antoine Roquentin, apparently independently wealthy, spends most of his day in the library researching and writing a biography of a fictitious 18th-century international political figure, a man named Rollebon.

The self-Taught Man is working his way methodically through the library alphabetically by author. The setting is the fictitious town of Bouville Mudville but according to Wiki is actually Le Harve where Sartre was living when he wrote this book.

The Self-Taught Man, enthusiastic about what he is learning, and the historical figure that Antoine is writing about, act as foils for his philosophical speculations. At times he is uncertain why he is writing his book. For a long time, Rollebon, the man has interested me more than the book to be written.

But now, the man…the man begins to bore me. It is the book which attracts me, I feel more and more the need to write — in the same proportions as I grow old, you might say.

Mental illness? Awareness of the absurdity of life? He calls these periods bouts of nausea, although he never has the physical symptoms of nausea. I straightened up, empty-handed. I am no longer free, I can no longer do what I will. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

I have a broken spring. I can move my eyes but not my head. The head is all pliable and elastic, as though it had been simply set on my neck; if I did turn it, it will fall off. That too bring on the Nausea. The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the cafe, I am the one who is within it. They would like to make us believe that their past is not lost, that their memories are condensed, gently transformed into wisdom.

She asks him to come to Paris, where she is passing through, to meet with her. When they meet, she tells him she is a 'kept woman' by an old wealthy man. It appears she is only meeting to assure herself that she is no longer in love with him. Antoine writes twice that he has not seen her for four years and twice that he has not seen her for six years. This makes us worry about the reliability of our narrator. We also remember that he is a name-dropper of places he has supposedly traveled.

He never tells us why he was in any place and they are always exotic places: Aden, Shanghai, Saigon, Benares — so we wonder. The book has a slow start but it picks up and in the end it kept my attention all the way through. Old postcard of Le Havre from almy. Nov 16, Kiri rated it really liked it Shelves: own , read-in , reviewed , favourites. Okay, wow. They should stock this thing in the bible section. Or the adult erotica section, because either way it gives you some pretty intense experiences.

In a nutshell: this book is kind of like an existentialist essay in the form of a diary. It's about this red-haired writer guy Antoine Roquentin, who's recently been overwhelmed with an intolerable awareness of his own existence. Like, super intolerable. Like, a soul-crushing, mind-blowing, nausea-inducing kind of intolerable.

It's pretty awe Okay, wow. It's pretty awesome. And the best thing - the best. Sartre, the fiend, satisfied me in ways that Dostoevsky and Camus never could.

I mean, when has an existentialist exposition ever been made so readable? So ironic and captivating, so funny - there were times I actually laughed out loud.

Moreover, Sartre gets me. I honestly cannot describe the feeling of holding a crummy paperback filled with words written over 50 years ago, and finding one of your own thoughts in amongst those of a fictional character. I guess it's what Christians must feel like when they read the bible.

Or what middle-aged single women feel while reading a particularly steamy passage of Passion in the Prairie. This is the kind of book you could read again and again, discovering some new detail every time, and getting something different out of it with every read. A new favourite! May 18, Andie rated it really liked it Shelves: finished. If you live in Florida, lets say Ft. Lauderdale, don't read this book That's my only warning.

Otherwise, it's a great book. View all 4 comments. Sartre is an author I don't like very much. He's also one of the few authors I almost always agree with, unfortunately. If that is not enough to cause some nausea, one can add a bit of existential anxiety and here we go: by hitting Sartre in the face with Camus' idea of the absurdity of life, I have confirmed Sartre's bleak outlook on humanity as well.

If I had liked it, I would have solved the Catch 22 of life! Sartre is hard to stomach because he doesn't add any decoration to the account of h Sartre is an author I don't like very much. Sartre is hard to stomach because he doesn't add any decoration to the account of human misery. He just puts it out there. Or wait - there is ornament. In the form of black symbols on white paper, he serves treatment for the illness: to write is to exist!

So as a reader, I have no choice but to write a review, to prove my existence in time and space, or maybe in letters and ink? Code in cloud? I read, therefore I am. It doesn't mean I have to like it in the sense of giving pleasure! View all 7 comments. Jan 13, jack rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: anyone who loves the smiths, anyone over the age of Mar 01, Tosh rated it really liked it.

Written in the late 30's, Sartre's study of a man who analyze his feelings, bearings on a world that makes him sick. This book has so much identity to it, that it is almost a brand name for 'youth. Unless it's Starbucks, and then it is just We were talking about novels that begin really badly then change gear and turn into great reads.

One of my favorites from this year did just that - Old Goriot. This is another. I forgot how to open my mouth. Yeah, things. Damn those things! What things? Oh you know, spoons, eyebrows, planets. I noticed something horrible in the mirror. After an hour of staring I formed a theory that it was me. My eyes looked like baked beans and my mouth like a forgotten sock that gets left in the washing machine.

I decided to write a book called Funny Turn. I look out of my window and see two old women fighting in the street. They have knives and bicycle chains. They are in their seventies. If I opened the window a little further and leaned over some more I would topple into the street. Why not? I was so irritated. But after page Sartre suddenly found the real voice of this novel, and it was a revelation. He can be brilliant. After all that uninteresting bellyaching I was not expecting a series of fulminations of such terminal loathing that Philip Roth, rantmeister nonpareil, could only goggle at in wonder.

Still he pities the sheeple who have not taken the red pill and still have mortgages and husbands and eyebrows. They have dragged out their lives in stupor and somnolence, they have married in a hurry, out of impatience, and they have children at random. Everything that has happened around them has begun and ended out of their sight. Horror movie images flicker on and off through the rest of the book, parts of which seem like William Burroughs and even Hunter Thompson.

Things have broken free from their names. There they are, grotesque, stubborn, gigantic But still he finds a very tiny bit of compassion for things and people - They did not want to exist, only they could not help it; that was the point. She says she needed him in her life. Also, zero plot, but you kind of guessed that anyway. If you do you might say the same thing about any album by Megadeth.

I mean. An insufferable philosophical classic, penned in nauseating and styleless first person prose. Roquentin is an arrogant buffoon whose existential woes are trivial, arch and pathetic.

No attempt to create a novel has been made, apart from using that most lazy of constructs, the diary, opening the whole work out to a meandering thought-stream of excruciating random dullness. But I get it. Life is horrible, etc, free will is illusory, etc etc. Got it. I read up to p Absolute tish-pock. He accompanied me at one time, and I never stopped seeing him.

When you like Sartre's philosophy, it allows you to identify with a character who observes the world and is disgusted by it, so vain does it seem to him. He tries to make sense of his existence, to understand why he lives, but he comes to a sad and hopeless conclusion.

It is not easy to read, it puts off and gives the blues, but it allows us to put words on the pain of living that we can sometimes feel. The important thing is to get out. Sep 08, Alex rated it really liked it Shelves: The thing with existentialism is that once you admit there's no meaning, you have to admit that there's no meaning, and people get freaked out about it.

I don't know why. I was raised atheist and I've never thought there was any meaning and it seems okay to me; maybe it's only scary if you used to think there was a meaning and suddenly you find out there isn't one.

Listen, I'll tell you the meaning of life. Neither of those things occur to Antoine Roquentin in this The thing with existentialism is that once you admit there's no meaning, you have to admit that there's no meaning, and people get freaked out about it.

Sartre felt that we have to create our own meaning, which both is and isn't what I've done here, and his protagonist doesn't get around to it. The Nausea is what he gets when he thinks about how nothing means anything, which happens often. There are no rules, he thinks. There is no organization.

Here are some more for you. Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea. But, after all, it was their Sunday, not mine. What if something suddenly started throbbing?

Here's another thing Roquentin says: "I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then, anything, anything could happen. I mean - if this is your first existential freakout, you might get more out of it. I feel like maybe this should be read during college, when people get pretty fired up for existential freakouts.

If you're already a grown-up, it's frankly too late for this kind of malarkey. Listen: life is meaningless. You don't need to be here. It's fine. Be nice. Have fun. View all 16 comments. Nothing matters. Life is meaningless. Life is pointless. Life is empty. I'm going to have to reread this again to fully wrap my head around it.

I would like this smile to reveal all that he is trying to hide from himself. Reading Nausea was a unique experience, and definitely, mind-blowing read that left me in awe. Jean-Paul Sartre is painfully honest in character of Roquentin, a lost introverted man in his thirties, tormented by loneliness, anguish, doubt and above all, Nausea, the pain of existing.

The book starts with notes in his diary, and in the first few words, we see that he is the real truth seeker, the kind that values truth more than conformity, the kind that would rather suffer and know the truth than live in a lie in the painless state of existing.

The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearly—let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, this street, the people, my packet of tobacco, since those are the things which have changed. I must determine the exact extent and nature of this change. This is what I have to avoid, I must not put in strangeness where there is none.

I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you're always looking for something. I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing. I was neither father nor grandfather, not even a husband.

I did not have a vote, I hardly paid any taxes: I could not boast of being a taxpayer, an elector, nor even of having the humble right to honour which twenty years of obedience confers on an employee.

My existence began to worry me seriously. I don't want any communion of souls, I haven't fallen so low. It can be the defense mechanism of intellectualization and rationalization of love, but I laughed out loud, as well in some other parts of the novel, in admiration that someone verbalized the part of the truth that we all subconsciously know, but refuse to talk or think about.

I don't listen to them any more: they annoy me. They're going to sleep together. They know it. Each one knows that the other knows it. But since they are young, chaste and decent, since each one wants to keep his self-respect and that of the other, since love is a great poetic thing which you must not frighten away, several times a week they go to dances and restaurants, offering the spectacle of their ritual, mechanical dances.

After all, you have to kill time. They are young and well built, they have enough to last them another thirty years. So they're in no hurry, they delay and they are not wrong. Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence. Odd feelings Roquentin experiences in the nauseated consciousness are nothing more than confrontation with bare existence and nothingness. He displays obvious cynical mockery and even disgust for himself and for the world, but in the same way, under the feeling of emptiness and deep philosophical debates he has with himself, there is profound interest and concern for the fate of the individual person and longing for meaning.

His search for meaning is turned within himself, as he attempts to find meaning in his own inner life and experience. In the void of his inner experiences, he loses track of time, space and himself in the processes of derealization and depersonalization in archaic visions. He tries to give life meaning by writing a book, and reviving old passion with his longtime lover, but is faced with ultimate failure each time. Reconciliation is found in the acceptance of contingency and absurd, concepts in which he finally feels liberated but not fulfilled nor happy.

And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity. Absurdity: another word; I struggle against words; down there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity here. A movement, an event in the tiny coloured world of men is only relatively absurd: by relation to the accompanying circumstances.

The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift.

I am free: there is absolutely no more reason for living, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can't imagine any more of them. I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death. I am bored, that's all. From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek.

It is a profound boredom, profound, the profound heart of existence, the very matter I am made of. Expressed absolute boredom and emptiness, and will to sacrifice comfort for freedom reminded me of Madame Bovary, a character that I could heavily relate when I read that books years ago. I could definitely relate to Roquentin, and I think he is a level of epic character, like Dostoevsky characters, that live inside in each one of us.

With Nausea, I had a liberating feeling when you read a book for the first time and see someone talk about the parts of you that you never shared with anyone because you thought no one would understand. Even thought Rouqentin had shattering feelings of loneliness in the chaos of existence, I think he made a lot of people like me feel less alone, and I applaud Sartre for that.

The more I think about Nause the more I see what a masterpiece of literature it is. View all 5 comments. A Novel of Ideas? Much criticism of "Nausea" describes it as a novel of ideas, as if this is necessarily a pejorative term.

To me, the term as used in this negative context implies that the characters are a mere mouthpiece for ideas or ideologies, and that they simply argue with each other until a resolution is reached or not.

I question whether this characterisation applies to "Nausea", and would like to make a case for an alternative perspective on the novel in this review. Ironically, to argu A Novel of Ideas? Ironically, to argue my case, I have to delve into the metaphysical concerns of the novel.

I'll concentrate on Sartre's text and keep my comments to a minimum, so that you can get an impression of the tone of the novel. It was a lot more amusing than I had expected. It's been suggested that the novel reflects the intuitive investigation of various ideas that Sartre would later document more analytically in "Being and Nothingness".

Iris Murdoch called it "the instructive overture to Sartre's work. While reading the novel, I wondered whether it explored concepts defined by Heidegger in "Being and Time". However, it's known that Sartre hadn't read "Being and Time" by the time he finished "Nausea".

It's more likely that the ultimate source of some of these ideas was Husserl, rather than Heidegger. It's still possible that Sartre was familiar with Heidegger because he might have read secondary materials or encountered other people's responses to its initial publication.

Late in the novel, Sartre alludes to the question asked in the first paragraph of Heidegger's "The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics": "Why is there something rather than nothing? If I've understood it correctly, the Idea is akin to Heidegger's concepts of Being, Dasein and Existence, precursors of which can be found in Husserl.

For the protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, the Idea is like a Thing or, more philosophically, it's like "Thingness" or "Thinginess". This Thing almost takes on a character of its own and, in doing so, takes on the character of Roquentin in an adversary sense or so he thinks. Roquentin describes it in terms of an illness or a virus hence his nauseous response, what he calls his "sweet disgust" : "Something has happened to me: I can't doubt that any more.

It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything obvious. It installed itself cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little awkward, and that was all Like Sartre himself, he was a man alone.

He sets out to understand the Thing, as well as himself in contrast to it: "I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late. This allows Sartre to read Roquentin's mind. Apart from some dynamic set pieces, in which Roquentin reacts to other people and the environment, the novel focuses on Roquentin's internal struggle. It is particularly impressive, if you have a metaphysical bent and are prepared to suspend disbelief.

There's a frequent playful or comic undertone to the journal. At times, it reminded me of a 's B-movie "The Thing from Another World" , in which the Thing was the alien, the enemy, the bad guy. The Thing seems to embody all that threatens Roquentin philosophically or existentially: "Things are bad!

Things are very bad: I've got it, that filthy thing, the Nausea. And this time it's new: it caught me in a cafe And there it is: since then, the Nausea hasn't left me, it holds me in its grip. Not quite alone. There is still that idea, waiting in front of me. It has rolled itself into a ball, it remains there like a big cat; it explains nothing, it doesn't move, it simply says no.

No, I haven't had any adventures. The past did not exist. Not at all. Existence, liberated, released, surges over me. He recognizes the power of a being-for-itself to chose its own essence, just as it decides what color an object is.

Because of this choice, Sartre believed that humans were fundamentally free to do whatever they wanted. Indeed, Roquentin continuously states that he just wants to be free. But with this freedom comes the responsibility for one's actions. Sartre believed that this staggering responsibility makes people anxious and ultimately leads them to deny both their freedom and responsibility. For example, Anny is afraid to act because she does not want to be responsible for breaking with her past.

As Sartre explained, responsibility "condemns us to be free. The themes of time and free will also preoccupy Roquentin's search for the cause of his Nausea. His desire to be free and self-sufficient provokes him to abandon his research on the Marquis de Rollebon.

He realizes that he had been attempting to "resuscitate" Rollebon in order to justify his own existence. He decides that the past is a meaningless concept that does not exist. Instead, he embraces the present as the only moment where and when things do exist. He thinks that people emphasize their past to take a "vacation from existence. As Sartre explained, this is an example of bad faith: Anny rejects her freedom to choose her own essence because the responsibility is too great.

Roquentin also thinks that people tell stories so as to put time in a recognizable and linear order, trying to "catch time by the tail. Roquentin's rejection of the past causes him to embrace his existence in the present. He constantly repeats "I exist" and mocks the people of Bouville who refuse to recognize their own existence.

But he discovers that existence is a "deflection. If evolution were to happen over again, the results would be completely different. Instead of reason, he finds only "nothingness," an empty vacuum that paradoxically makes up existence. Sartre uses the theme of contingency to criticize humanism's emphasis on a rational world with human existence as its focus and purpose.