Nausea dramatizes the philosophy of being through daily experience rather than argument
Evidence
On a whim, I spent some of my sixteenth-birthday money on his 1938 novel Nausea, mainly because I liked the Salvador Dalí image on the Penguin cover: a bile-green rock formation and a dripping watch. I also liked the cover blurb, which called Nausea ‘a novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being’. I wasn’t sure what alienation meant, although I was a perfect example of it at the time. But I had no doubt that it would be my kind of book. It was indeed: when I started reading, I bonded at once with its gloomy outsider protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who spends his days drifting disconsolately around the provincial seaside town of ‘Bouville’ (modelled on Le Havre, where Sartre had been stuck as a teacher). Roquentin sits in cafés and listens to blues records instead of getting on with the biography he is supposed to be writing. He walks by the sea and throws pebbles into its grey, porridge-like depths. He goes to a park and stares at the gnarled exposed root of a chestnut tree, which looks to him like boiled leather and threatens to overwhelm him by the sheer opaque force of its being. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 83
Categorization
- DEFINE: Orients the reader to how Sartre’s fiction presented being and alienation concretely, a helpful entry-point for the movement.
- XREF: connects to: Minor everyday failures can trigger disproportionate existential discomfort — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 239; Nausea reveals facticity through the body’s inescapable belonging to being; Nausea is the nonpositional apprehension of one’s own contingent facticity, not a metaphor — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 886 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Nausea is the nonpositional apprehension of one’s own contingent facticity, not a metaphor
#expands(0.88) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 886 - Nausea reveals facticity through the body’s inescapable belonging to being
#corroborates(0.85) - Fundamental nausea reveals the facticity of existence beneath all empirical disgusts
#expands(0.80) - Phenomenology becomes existentialist when applied to ordinary lived experiences.
#corroborates(0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 24