Nausea

Antoine’s nausea is constantly with him after his argument with the Self-Taught Man. Words have become “feeble points of reference” for Antoine, who no longer believes that words can convey existence or meaningful information about objects (127). Antoine realizes that all of existence is contingent, or circumstantial and brought about by random happenstance. Antoine’s final attack of nausea and anxiety occurs in a park, where he fixates on a tree root. The tree root makes him realize that the word “root” is a meaningless human construction to lump together existing things. For an existentialist like Antoine, the things lumped together under “root” exist before the word and human pattern recognition. This pre-existence before language means that language is a way of enforcing meaning and habit on something chaotic and meaningless. This leads Antoine to discover the “naked World” stripped of meaning before he visits Anny (134).

Several days later, Antoine visits Anny in Paris. He immediately notices she is a completely different person than the Anny of five years ago. Anny once decorated her hotel rooms with heaps of personal items, customizing them with her presence. Now she leaves them exactly as she finds them without a single personal decoration.