Nausea
The philosophical novel centers around the explorations of Antoine Roquentin who becomes increasingly aware (or paranoid) of the oddities of the events and things around him. The work is impressionistic and often hard to comprehend literally, yet it achieves in describing Antoine great, even incoherent detail. The crux of the novel is around Antoine’s realization of the abundance of existence around him, this abundance of existence in the world causes his self-diagnosed nausea as he constantly feels that the world is somewhat strange and off. This nausea effected a great change in his life, work, and his relationships with others, ultimately isolating him. In all I loved the presentation of the philosophical content in novel form as it’s palatable and at times very salient, and it’s given me new thoughts on being cognizant of societal artifices of work and love and also in creating some ersatz meaning to keep destructive nihilism at bay.
Throughout the entire work Antoine has often peeled away at the normal and glanced at something overwhelmingly abominable behind the normal: the existence of everything, the meaningless of their existence, the absurdity of how humans believe in meaning. From all of this Antoine arrives at an interesting climax (in the novel, the chestnut tree scene), where he talks of the combination of material universalism and semantic nihilism: where everything exists but has no meaning behind why they do. Despite this, at the end of the work Antoine begins to embark on another journey to create art in the form of a novel in order to “remember [his] life without repugnance”. Perhaps this ending is in his realization that the contrived meanings have a therapeutic effect on soothing the psyche and protecting it from the horrid effects of the nausea. In having realized the overall meaningless, Antoine is empowered to see the meaning of the art he will create by his own standards and without the distortion caused by society that has so tormented him.
% grep -i "nausea" quotes.txt10 matches
on love
“It’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on courtship
“They’re going to sleep together. They know it … Since love is a great poetic thing which you must not frighten away, several times a week they go to dances and restaurants, offering the spectacle of their ritual, mechanical dances … Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on urbanity
“Cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on self-deception
“[The doctor] would like to hide out the stark reality: that he is alone, without gain, without a past, with an intelligence which is clouded, a body which is disintegrating. For this reason he has carefully built up, furnished, and padded his nightmare compensation: he says he is making progress”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on existence
“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on existence
“I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on existence
“Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on superficiality
“When one is confronted with a face sparkling with righteousness, after a moment this sparkle dies away, and only an ashy residue remains; this residue interested me”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on conformity
“People who live in society have learned how to see themselves as mirrors as they appear to their friends”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
on time
“I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail”
— (Antoine Roquentin), Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea