Nausea

“If I am not mistaken, if all the signs which have been amassed are precursors of a new overthrow in my life, well then I am terrified. It isn’t that my life is rich, or weighty or precious. But I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me—and drag me—where? Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished? Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken, deceived, in the midst of new ruins? I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.”

Antoine fears the freedom he has to give up his purpose and search for a new purpose at any moment. Antoine’s nausea eventually drives him to do just this. Antoine suggests that “the Nausea” is something that “possesses” and “drags” him, raising the question of whether or not the Antoine at the start of the novel is really the same person as the Antoine at the end of the novel.

“Perhaps it is impossible to understand one’s own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. […] Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say—yes you might say, nature without humanity.”

Antoine repeatedly suggests that it is his complete disconnect from others that brings on his existential revelations (and dread). Without others, he is free from the façade of essence (“humanity”) and can see existence underneath (“nature”).

“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.”

Antoine’s simile of the devil’s purse evokes feelings of illusion and malicious trickery around memory. “Snare” and “caught” reinforce the evocative image of being trapped and tricked wrongfully. Memory within Nausea is treated with suspicion.

“It was almost three o’clock […] I felt the afternoon all through my heavy body. Not my afternoon, but theirs, the one a hundred thousand Bouvillois were going to live in common. At this same time, after the long and copious Sunday meal, they were getting up from the table, for them something had died. Sunday had spent its fleeting youth. You had to digest the chicken and the tart, get dressed to go out.”

Antoine is always the outside observer of life in Bouville. He presents himself like a biologist examining the behavior of an animal species. The Bouville people living “in common” stresses the communal nature of creating essence: Sundays are meant to be spent a certain way because everybody in Bouville spends their Sundays in similar ways together. Antoine believes this communal essence is unstable and “dies” the moment the shared ritual of Sunday dinner is completed.

“They felt the minutes flowing between their fingers; would they have time to store up enough youth to start anew on Monday morning? They filled their lungs because sea air vivifies: only their breathing, deep and regular as that of sleepers, still testified that they were alive.”

Antoine frames the work week as a sedative that keeps people asleep. This analogy portrays Sunday as the only day people can really experience existence free of essence. The simple act of breathing is a necessity for living. Antoine uses breathing as a symbol for the raw existence underneath the façade of a person preparing for a work week.

“I said to myself: Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?”

“Adventure” is a name Antoine ascribes to the feeling of living in the moment. Adventure is what connects Antoine to his existence in the present. Before the nausea, Adventure awakened Antoine to the fleeting nature of the present and his inability to hold on to the meaning he creates moment to moment. Antoine’s thoughts on Adventure are a forerunner to his later exploration of history and memory.

“Soft glow: people are in their houses, they have undoubtedly turned on the lights too. They read, they watch the sky from the window. For them it means something different. They have aged differently. They live in the midst of legacies, gifts, each piece of furniture holds a memory. Clocks, medallions, portraits, shells, paperweights, screens, shawls. They have closets full of bottles, stuffs, old clothes, newspapers; they have kept everything. The past is a landlord’s luxury.”

Antoine argues that the experience of existence is shaped by people’s access to material goods. Here, “landlord” does not necessarily mean somebody who rents out property, but somebody who owns and inhabits their own property. People with homes can accumulate all kinds of material goods around them that shape how they experience time, memory, and the world outside of their home. These “legacies” show how objects hold power to alter our perceptions of the world, which is part of Antoine’s fear of them.

“They would like to make us believe that their past is not lost, that their memories are condensed, gently transformed into Wisdom. Convenient past! Past handed out of a pocket! little [sic] gilt books full of fine sayings.”

Echoing Antoine’s later conclusions on memory, memory of the past is treated as a deceptive illusion. Wisdom is an essence created in an attempt to hold on to past experience. From Antoine’s view, such a desire only leads to fooling oneself and others.

“Ten minutes to seven. I suddenly realized that the library closed at seven. Once again I was going to be cast out into the town. Where would I go? What would I do?”

Antoine is plagued by anxiety over what actions to take throughout the novel. The freedom he discovers in existence is too much for him at times. Antoine, who is perfectly free, has to create his own meaning and purpose at every turn.

“[I] had always realized it: I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.”

Antoine contends that nobody has the right to exist. The portraits of the powerful elite of Bouville, who believed they had the right to exist, spark this idea in Antoine. Antoine compares “right to exist” to the “contingency” of life. “Rights” are an essence overlaying the random happenstance of contingency that has produced life.

“[We] have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them…there is nothing.”

Nothing is a concept Sartre explores in Being and Nothingness. The idea of nothing for an existentialist cannot exist. When Antoine says there is “nothing” behind things and objects, Sartre is arguing that there is nothing that exists before things and objects: There is no meaning buried underneath them. Instead, meaning comes afterward.

“The thing which was waiting on the alert, it has pounced on me, it flows through me, I am filled with it. It’s nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist.”

Antoine’s experience of the overwhelming fullness of reality—and the thingness of it—is met by the experience of his own essential negativity, or lack of self-identity—which is to say, possibility to become something freely. The thing exists “in itself” in a way that human consciousness does not; human consciousness requires an object. In this encounter, the object floods over Antoine and fills him with its reality. Implicit here is a critique of both the Cartesian Cogito and the Husserlian transcendental ego.

“What a comedy! All these people sitting there, looking serious, eating. No, they aren’t eating; they are recuperating in order to successfully finish their tasks. Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists; there isn’t one of them who doesn’t believe himself indispensable to something or someone. […] But I know.”

Existence for Antoine means understanding that “indispensable” is a matter of essence. Antoine’s ideas about contingent existence means everything, under the surface, is always disposable and not necessary to existence.

“I’m furious, but not against [the Self-Taught Man], against [the humanists], all the ones who have poisoned this poor brain. If I could have them here in front of me I would have much to say to them. I shall say nothing to the Self-Taught Man, I have only sympathy for him: he is someone like M. Achille, someone on my side, but who has been betrayed by ignorance and good will!”

Antoine, Achille, and the Self-Taught Man are frequently lumped together. They are men on the margins: Antoine is a recluse, Achille is treated as if he has mental health issues, and the Self-Taught Man spends all of his time teaching himself about the world. Antoine believes the Self-Taught Man has been led astray by the lofty, abstract love for humanity that is core to humanism.

“So this is Nausea: this blinding evidence? […] Now I know: I exist—the world exists—and I know that the world exists. That’s all. It makes no difference to me. It’s strange that everything makes so little difference to me: it frightens me.”

The world exists and “that’s all.” For Antoine, everything that comes after existence is contingent on things existing without meaning, rhyme, or reason. This realization is terrifying to Antoine and fuels his isolation.

“Things are divorced from their names. 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.”

Like quote 13, Sartre is referring to the mode of existence of reality before it is boxed in with names and also to Antoine’s overwhelming experience of this reality. Although existentialism is often considered a philosophy of subjectivism, Sartre is committed to realism and not nominalism.

“I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned.”

All the excess Antoine has observed throughout the novel is not really excess as he has made it to be. Existence is an “all the way” phenomenon. The “flaunting abundance” Antoine sees around him is contrasted against his own reclusive, restrained existence. Despite Antoine’s radical freedom, Sartre suggests that he is not living in accordance with his observations about the world.

“Suspicious: that’s what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. […] But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves. The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content in relation to itself, in its heart.”

Antoine’s long, dense monologue culminates in a divorce between words and things: Existence and essence are severed for Antoine. The “flaunting abundance” of existence means every single thing has “too much content” to ever be represented faithfully in words and speech.

“[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.”

Contingent existence is a “free gift,” and it is the absolute. Traditional metaphysics associates the necessary (and not the contingent) with the absolute (God). Radical contingency frees Antoine from any predefined obligations and gives him the freedom to choose how to live.

“I thought [needing perfect moments was] part of you, that if it were taken away from you it would have been like tearing out your heart. […] But as you see I can live without that.”

Anny’s core character trait has changed dramatically since Antoine saw her last. Despite a radical shift in what he thought was necessary to her, Anny continues to exist and live. Anny’s change reinforces that existence is contingent: Every object and thing, like the paper Antoine likes to mash between his fingers, can radically change form and substance.

“I outlive myself.”

Anny’s motto is a perfect encapsulation of existentialist beliefs. By outliving her past selves, Anny demonstrates that there is no core kernel to herself as a person. She is a person who exists and who is removed from her own history: The only Anny who exists is the one who exists in the present.

“Do I know any reasons for living? I’m not as desperate as she is because I didn’t expect much. I’m rather…amazed before this life which is given to me—given for nothing. I keep my head bowed, I don’t want to see Anny’s face now. […] Take her in my arms? What good would it do? I can do nothing for her; she is as solitary as I.”

Antoine’s amazement at existence comes from its contingency. If everything around us is contingent and does not need to exist, then the existentialist believes it is all the more wonderful for existing.

“They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. And all this time, great, vague nature has slipped into their city, it has infiltrated everywhere, in their house, in their office, in themselves. It doesn’t move, it stays quietly and they are full of it inside, they breathe it, and they don’t see it, they imagine it to be outside, twenty miles from the city. I see it, I see this nature…I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow.”

Antoine does not believe that humans have tamed nature, but rather it lays dormant and asleep. The image of sleeping nature is paralleled to the image of the sleeping Sunday enjoyer who is preparing for the work week ahead; in both instances, habit shapes existence. Critically, for the existentialist, habit can change at any point.