Sartre’s “Nausea”

As part of my ongoing exploration of the works of existential thinkers, I’ve just finished reading the first novel by French existential philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), entitled Nausea.

Nausea, published in 1938, is one of Sartre’s fictional works, and like other existential writers of his time he uses fiction as a way to explore some of his philosophical ideas through characters and stories rather than just dry philosophical tomes.

I’ve heard people describe this relatively short novel as difficult reading, but I didn’t find it to be that at all. Strange? Yes. And maybe that’s the difficulty, but I also believe the strangeness is the point of the book.

The basic storyline sounds very simple. The book is written as a diary of a young man named Antoine Roquentin living in a city in France, while he tries to work on a history book he’s writing and otherwise navigate his life. In some sense, that’s it and not a whole lot happens, at least not externally. The book is really about following something strange, bizarre, and unsettling happening within Roquentin: his “Nausea”.

Nausea in the book doesn’t mean physical illness, but is a visceral experience that creeps up on Roquentin increasingly throughout the novel. It’s the unsettling feeling that overcomes him whenever the typical framework through which he sees the world suddenly falls away. To try to get a sense of what this experience is like, think of an everyday word and repeat it to yourself until it starts to sound strange, unfamiliar, and funny sounding. Roquentin’s Nausea is this kind of strange unfamiliarity experienced with basically everything in his life.

For example, Roquentin looks at his own body and realizes how strange it is, comparing his own hand to a crab turned on its back with its legs up in the air. He looks at everyday objects, like chairs, beer glasses, or tree roots, and realizes that the names he typically gives these objects or the ways he typically describes them, such as their color, have nothing to do with the raw experience of these objects themselves, but are just names and concepts.

On a more personal level, he realizes that we typically think of our lives in terms of storylines, as if there was a plot that made our life make sense. But when this framework of a storyline drops away, we can see that in actuality we don’t experience each moment as a story, but only tie moments together into a story after the fact.

What Roquentin keeps landing on with these experiences of Nausea is that existence is absurd, contingent, and superfluous. It is absurd, meaning that it is in itself unexplained. It is contingent, meaning that there is no reason for it to be as it is rather than some other way. And it is superfluous, meaning that it is unnecessarily excessive and extravagant. 

Looking at a tree, it is just there without explanation, and yet very uniquely and unnecessarily the way that it is, so detailed, complex, specific, and extravagant for no reason. It is so much more strange than we typically give it credit for when we just take for granted our concept of a tree, without stopping to actually look at one.

From an Existential Psychotherapy perspective, the detailed descriptions of the novel remind me of listening to a client describe their very subjective experience of what it means to be, and how weird, strange, and absurd being can be.

As Existential Psychotherapy describes, the raw givens of existence, like the strange absurdity of being, cause anxiety in us, and so we tend to protect ourselves against this anxiety. 

Throughout the novel, Roquentin notices different kinds of protection he and others seem to be using to avoid the strange absurdity of existence, whether through playing into roles provided by their relationships, or taking on some belief system that seems to explain things cleanly, or taking for granted the false sense of security provided by the mechanical predictability of city life uninvaded by nature’s messiness.

Sartre’s novel doesn’t seem interested in tying things up in a neat bow or providing some takeaway lesson from Roquentin’s experience. And that’s the point. Rather than escaping existence’s absurdity through some false explanation, the focus is instead on artfully describing that absurdity.

There is overlap here with my own approach to clients that I see. I am not interested in quickly jumping into a client’s subjective description of their life in all its messiness and imposing some clean explanation. To the extent that I fall into this trap, I am missing the mark. Instead, we begin with simply describing life’s messiness, as they experience it from their perspective, and with me as a support in giving that description clarity. 

From there, we can then begin to discover the choices available to them to navigate that strange, absurd, messiness that is life. I find that concepts can still be helpful at some point, but not when they are used to squeeze the weirdness out of life. As Nausea helps us remember and experience, existing is fundamentally just plain weird.

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