Nausea summary

Before the story begins, Nausea greets us with a fictional editor’s note. We learn that we’re about to read the unaltered diary of a Parisian historian called Antoine Roquentin. The diary entries are from 1932, when Antoine settled in the (fictional) French town of Bouville to complete his history on the (again, fictional) Marquis de Rollebon.

Then the diary begins. Antoine explains that he wants to start journaling because he’s experiencing some unsettling changes in his feelings and perceptions.

He tells us about his lonely life in Bouville. He inhabits a grim hotel room and spends his days in the local library researching. In between, he goes for walks, hangs out at cafés and bars, and has casual sex with women. We learn about the people in his life – an ex-lover named Anny whom he can’t quite forget; his chatty neighbor Lucie; and a peculiar autodidact known as the Self-Taught Man whom he met at the library.

As he goes about his solitary days, Antoine begins noticing odd changes in himself. He experiences moments of inexplicable anxiety and revulsion toward his surroundings. He becomes intensely bored with his research subject and has trouble looking in the mirror. He also feels a strange sense of dread emanating from the physical objects around him. For instance, when he picks up a pebble on the beach, he feels sick to his stomach.

One day, Roquentin goes to a café in hope of running into owner Françoise, his current casual affair. When he learns that Françoise is out of town, Roquentin is seized by a terrible feeling that he describes as nausea. He leaves the café to distract himself with a game of cards and a movie. But even through the fleeting joy of those experiences, the nausea sticks with him.

ANALYSIS

In the opening chapters, Sartre introduces the major existentialist themes that run through the novel. Protagonist Antoine begins to grapple with the meaninglessness of existence, feeling repulsed by the objects and people around him. Sartre’s spare, observational prose establishes a bleak mood that reflects Antoine’s growing alienation from the world. 

Antoine’s existential struggle has many parallels to Sartre’s own life. Sartre began writing Nausea in 1932, while living abroad in Berlin on a fellowship. Like his protagonist Antoine, he was supposed to be writing a historical biography. Many of Sartre’s ideas about alienation, freedom, and responsibility stem from his own experience with anxiety and depression during that time. 

Later in his life, Sartre explained that he had experimented with the hallucinogenic mescaline shortly before writing the novel. It caused in him effects similar to the nausea Antoine describes.