Nausea

Nausea is a philosophical novel by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Originally published in 1938, the novel was first translated to English in 1949. Nausea takes place in the fictional French city of Bouville (“Mud Town”) and follows the day-to-day life of the reclusive historian Antoine Roquentin. Antoine lives completely alone, without friends or family, as he researches and writes a book on an 18th-century French aristocrat, the Marquis de Rollebon. Antoine’s daily interactions with the world around him and his work begin to make him sick and disoriented, a feeling he calls “the Nausea.” Antoine’s alienation becomes increasingly severe as he begins to question his own existence and what existence really means. Antoine’s descent is told as a series of diary entries, presented by a diegetic editor as a real diary.

Nausea is Sartre’s first novel. It is a philosophical novel, perhaps the philosophical novel par excellence, meaning a novel written to explore philosophical ideas. However, the novel also stands as a powerful work of fiction. It was written at the suggestion of Simone de Beauvoir as a way for Sartre to work out his thinking (and his feelings) about the problem of contingency.