Jean-Paul Satre’s Nausea
06.01.2025 Literature Club with Charlie Trenerry
“In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together?”
This month, typing one-handed in my slightly shitty apartment with only my personal hotspot to guide me, glasses broken, oscillating wildly from one book to the next to the next, deciding what to write about, wondering what to say, I kept circling back to this one text: Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Given its connection to a past review of mine on Virginia Woolf, and to another I have waiting in the wings on Sartre’s equally famed lover, Simone de Beavoir, it’s nice that it has worked out as such.
I’ve found this book impossible to ignore, to distract myself from, since my most recent re-read. All due to the mirror it holds, the parallels to our lives today. And the one large, undeniable, unignorable choice, the question explicitly asked in the text: to live? Or to tell the story?
Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal existential work, the novel Nausea, or La Nausee, follows Antoine Roquentin, a solitary writer and intellectual who becomes overwhelmed by feelings of alienation from the world around him. We read as he grows increasingly disgusted at his peoples’ obsession with sameness, with social safety at the expense of morals and intelligence, and the unwillingness of those he observes (and this is so much of what he does: observe); to speak, to embolden themselves, to see beyond what keeps them comfortable.
Sitting in a park, under a tree, watching, he says:
“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together?”
Our protagonist often finds himself at a cafe, the owner of which, Monsieur Fasquelle, is watched, as everyone is watched by Roquentin. Once the customers have gone back onto the streets to continue their self-important reverie, and the cafe is empty of the subjects of his examination, Roquentin too, becomes empty, “unconscious”.
“When his place empties, his head empties too.”
Our narrator’s identity is not self-determined, for his sense of self relies on his interaction with others. This ongoing observation and judgement is what builds our man to his disgust, already rooted in the opening pages, but becoming more potent as we progress, eventually leading to a self-titled ‘nausea’. Nausea at the sight of ordinary objects, mundane situations, and even interactions in passing. Roquentin grapples with his loathing, his superiority and fear, coming to terms with the meaninglessness of, well, everything. His attempts to free himself from the suffocating grasp of his own thoughts prove fruitless--I’m making it all sound rather grim I think--it shouldn’t be. The novel is an impactful lesson.
His observations on the cafe owner are not spelled out, and Sartre’s writing allows the reader to reach conclusions on their own. But we are all able to arrive there in the end, at the same warning: if we rely so heavily on the influence of, and interaction with others, there will be nothing left of us when they are gone. Fasquelle in his cafe, or those in the park: if we allow our thoughts, our beliefs and morals to stand by the wayside in order to avoid rocking the boat, we will find ourselves lost in a sea of empty platitudes, and once again empty when the tide recedes.
Sartre gives us readers the opportunity to begin this train of thought from the opening pages. We sit with Roquentin, observing, not yet entirely nauseous. He writes,
“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.”
And here is that mirror I mentioned, a chance to perceive Roquentin’s observations through today’s lens. The similarities, so blindingly apparent. Land yourself in the crowd of a gig, a gallery, a festival or a play; we all know that the chances of what is unfurled infront of us will be watched through screens, by some. Look at our lives, the greatest glimpse most people see of their acquaintances is through what they may or may not have seen through the eyes of tech.
No shame, for there is a great beauty in it. We remain story-tellers, through the ages, at our hearts. We are, and shall always be. But a choice remains on how we would like to go forward, for I’m not sure we can any longer do both. In the nauseating whirl of existence, Sartre’s words highlight the tension between being and narrating. To live is to be immersed in the raw, unfiltered present, to feel the pulse of life without the comforting distance of story or screen.
To tell, to recount, is to wrap the mundane in a shimmering veil, transforming it into an adventure, a quest. We tell ourselves that we are the heroes of our own tales, that life has structure, meaning, purpose—if only we shape it with words and the right images. Yet, in this act of narration, we risk losing the essence of living, distorting the very thing we seek to understand.
Sartre’s paradox echoes: to live fully is to relinquish the need for story, to embrace the nausea of existence without the cushion of interpretation. To tell, however, is to disconnect, to obscure the immediacy of being. And so, the choice hangs heavy: to live, exposed and unfiltered, or to weave our lives into tales and illustrations.
To live, or to tell the story.
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