Nausea

Pages 1-40 portray the central thematic conflict of essence versus existence in a breakdown between objects and the words/ideas used to understand those objects. This is an approach to the experience of contingency that was described in the Overview section of this guide: If everything is radically contingent and nothing arises by necessity, then the very words that we use to grasp experience, by giving an order and meaning to things, actually function to obscure reality more than present it (or represent). When Antoine stares at his own face for too long, he begins to catalogue the various components that create his face (16-17). Antoine can accurately identify his lips, his nose, and so on, but he cannot find the thing called a human face. What he sees in the mirror is “well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of jellyfish” (17). The obviously “human” component vanishes, his own facticity is all that is left, and looking in the mirror produces a radical estrangement. The abstract concept of the recognized human face tends to what an existentialist would call essence: meaning projected on things that exist without meaning or categorical cohesion.

In Being and Time, Heidegger wrote that we apprehend the world into which we find ourselves thrown via the mediation of moods. Heidegger focuses in that book on the anxiety that arises from awareness of death. In Nausea, Sartre posits that the mood appropriate to an awareness of radical contingency is nausea. Antoine’s inability to recognize his face, the breakdown of the connection between essence and existence—the breakdown of meaning—produces the experience of nausea in Antoine. Antoine’s tendency to analyze the world by its concrete, discrete parts catalyzes this separation between objects and meaning. Likewise, Antoine’s precise observations of other people’s minute actions, gestures, and appearances reduce all of humanity around him to a meaningless collection of objects, features, and actions, like his own face.

Antoine’s relationships with women foreshadow the severe loneliness of freedom that he will struggle with later in the novel. Antoine says he lives entirely alone, never speaks to anybody, and receives nothing while giving nothing to another (6). The one small exception is Françoise. Antoine sometimes asks her if she has time in the evening when he visits for his evening beer. Françoise never rejects his advances, but the two never talk beyond Antoine’s suggestive question (6). Antoine says he sleeps with Françoise to “purge [himself] of a certain nostalgia” (6). The two never speak afterward or much during sex because Antoine believes life is “every man for himself” (7). Antoine’s need to “purge” himself of “nostalgia” (perhaps Anny or his sense of adventure) suggests that he feels trapped in the past despite his total freedom in Bouville. Antoine’s struggle to rid himself of nostalgia is at odds with his later claims in the novel of having total, radical freedom (157). Antoine hides from the anxiety of his present freedom by seeking nostalgia in the companionship of women. This is further reinforced when Françoise is not present at the Railwaymen’s Rendezvous one day. When Françoise isn’t present for their routine sex, Antoine begins to dissociate from his surroundings: Nausea attacks and he is no longer aware of where he is (18). This disruption to his habitual contact with another person means that Antoine has used his relationship with Françoise to hide in nostalgia for a past that no longer exists: He is hiding from the present, and his lonely freedom, in doing so.

History and memory play an integral role in tying together Antoine’s loneliness and his growing disconnect between essence and existence. When Antoine examines his collection of photographs to search for appropriate ones to give the Self-Taught Man, he remarks “I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape” (33). Antoine calls these photographs that forsake him “aphrodisiacs” (33). The sexual connotation of aphrodisiacs ties the photographs to Antoine’s sexual relationship with Françoise and the nostalgia he is trying to escape. From his first contact with the past, Antoine frames it as a dead present that he is exiled from. The past is not a part of present-day Antoine but a different life that a different Antoine once lived. Antoine cannot escape because, through an existentialist lens, it is impossible to access the past. This is why the “idea” haunts Antoine during the photograph scene: He believes he hasn’t had any adventures, despite the photographs in front of him (36). If the passage of time makes the past fully inaccessible, then present-day Antoine has not had any adventures: Dry historical research in a library constitutes all of present-day Antoine’s experience. Antoine’s encounter with the photographs establishes the necessary philosophical context for him to later claim that his past is dead (97). Memory is often treated as an illusion in Nausea, and history is inaccessible to the present-day versions of people.