Nausea

Antoine’s encounter with Achille and Rogé is a demonstration of the soothing effects offered by essence to existence. Antoine is unsettled by Achille’s presence in the café. Antoine notes, “There is no sympathy between us; we are alike, that’s all. […] He must be waiting for his own Nausea or something of that sort” (65). Achille is one of the few people that Antoine feels kinship with, yet he wants to avoid conversation with the other man at all costs. Achille’s odd behavior and his affliction with nausea suggests that a conversation between the two men would exacerbate Antoine’s own nausea. Doctor Rogé is, unlike Achille and Antoine, a well-adjusted and very successful man. Rogé feels at ease using his past experience to hand out wisdom and structure the world around him: He uses his position as a doctor to garner authority and then uses that authority to make the world intelligible to others. Rogé is a “professional in experience” (67) and diagnoses Achille as a “crazy” man (66). Both Antoine and Achille are soothed by this diagnosis. When Achille is diagnosed, he “relaxes, he feels protected against himself: nothing will happen to him today. I [Antoine] am reassured too. A crazy old loon: so that was it, so that was all” (67). Antoine disparages Rogé’s “Wisdom” and considers him a charlatan (68) yet allows his diagnosis to defuse the situation. Antoine knows Achille isn’t “crazy,” but Rogé’s diagnosis soothes the anxiety of a potential conversation with Achille. In existentialist terms, Rogé applies an essence to the situation: “Craziness” is an abstract idea Rogé has constructed over a lifetime of seeing clusters of symptoms in various patients, which he has deemed afterward the essence of “craziness.” Antoine, who knows nothing about Achille except for their shared loneliness and nausea, is afraid of a conversation in uncharted territories with another man like himself. Rogé’s soothing presence and diagnosis is an essence overlaid on existence. Antoine lets himself be fooled because he wants to be soothed and lose his anxiety. Sartre uses this scene to illustrate the merits of essence, or why people might choose to believe essence can structure existence: Essence allows people to use pre-constructed social scripts to navigate situations with one another and themselves, even when those social scripts are wrong.

In this section, the loneliness of freedom becomes a great source of anxiety for Antoine. Radical freedom is, of course, a concomitant to the radical contingency of the world into which we are thrown. Antoine considers the library where he works a solid, stable place: The library is always the library and cannot change. Due to his belief that Fasquelle died in the café while Antoine drank coffee, the library begins to feel like “carboard scenery which could quickly be removed” (77). Antoine writes, “Anything can happen, anything,” and then becomes frightened, fleeing the library (77). Habit and routine customs begin crumbling around Antoine from the moment Françoise was not in the Railwaymen’s Rendezvous. Antoine is convinced that the world remains stable and habitual out of “laziness” but can upheave any routine at will (77). The loss of routine and the stability of the library environment means that Antoine is confronted with radical freedom: In the absence of routine and habit, he can do anything he pleases. Antoine is often left unable to act due to the anxiety of his freedom. When he believes Fasquelle is dead, he hesitates to go up the stairs and check on the café owner despite nothing physically barring his way up (73-74). Antoine nearly always freezes when presented with choices throughout the novel. Antoine’s feelings that “anything can happen” reflect his growing inability to enact the freedom he possesses.

Meanwhile, Antoine’s relationship to his historical research grows more unstable. Antoine once spent a month verifying a single claim Rollebon made in a letter (58). The all-consuming research has given him purpose and a reason to function within the world. Antoine grows increasingly agitated with Rollebon and his research in this section. He feels as if Rollebon is always outside of his grasp and that all of the letters and treatises left behind by Rollebon do not actually contain anything useful about the man. Antoine’s descriptions of his work shift from analytical to imaginative. Instead of unearthing facts, Antoine spends his time in the library imagining Rollebon by “letting [himself] go” (58). The shift toward the imaginative coupled with Antoine’s frustration suggests that he is unable to “find” Rollebon in his letters and treatises. Antoine’s existentialist decoupling between existence and essence means that Rollebon’s letters are an essence left behind. Antoine can only feel genuine proximity to who Rollebon was by letting go of his historical research and imagining the aristocrat. Antoine’s ultimate decision to write fiction argues that such imaginative works might be a better way of connecting to the past than pretending he can objectively unearth Rollebon through his historical letters (58, 59, 178).