Book Review: "Nausea" by Jean-Paul Sartre

I've read this book before but I have to admit, I lost my copy. I vaguely remember leaving it somewhere (like that time I left my copy of Algernon Blackwood's collected stories at a job interview once a while back - that really annoyed me because I was enjoying that). But I have definitely read it before and I can't really recall whether I enjoyed it, but I recall being conflicted from time to time. This memory was remembered through being conflicted again whilst I was reading it a second time. There were a couple of things I don't really like about this book, but they are weighted with the few things that are fairly enjoyable.

It is formulated as a fictional diary and documents the life of a character named Antoine Roquentin. He is a historian who lives in a fictional town in France. As he attempts to finish his research on an 18th-century political figure, he begins to experience a creeping sense of alienation and disorientation which he refers to as 'Nausea'. I think it's a kind of metaphysical sickness, but it was a pretty deep idea. One thing you have to know is that there isn't really a big plot to this book that you can follow. It is just this guy's inner-conflict.

Roquentin is deeply alone, he is literally that guy who has absolutely nobody. He has no close friends and avoids meaningful social contact. I mean, it's a great representation of the everyman in our world today. He spends his time visiting cafés, observing townspeople, working in the library and there's no emotional attachment there, ever. As this metaphysical 'nausea' settles in, he feels increasingly detached, even to the point where he has out of body experiences. I mean, that's all well and good but as it gets more and more detached it gets a bit more difficult to understand what he's going through.

Here's how I understood the idea of 'nausea' itself...

It is a visceral, recurring sensation that overwhelms him. It's not a physical illness and so, there are no signs on the face or body that you can tell about the character who is experiencing it. Raw things become too much to handle, even if it's as simple as a pebble. Throughout the book, he finds that more and more he needs to confront this nausea and so, he starts to break it down into the fact that some things don't have a deeper meaning. There's things that simply exist. Honestly, this revelation was exhausting for me and when I wrote about being conflicted about the book, this is really what I was talking about. I just think this whole concept was made into such a big deal and I'm ready to accept that perhaps it went over my head a little bit, but it definitely went from being understandable to being completely unnecessary.

It goes through this weird 'discovery' that identity is fragile. I mean, I'm sure there are some people who have fragile identities, but there are definitely others who are pretty sure about themselves. So this blanket ideology made no sense. But even weirder is that this guy is a historian and so naturally, he goes from emotionally detached to basically asking himself the most absurd question he possibly can: what's the point of documenting something that has no objective meaning? I'm just going to leave that stupidity hanging in the air.

The Self-Taught Man, a fellow library-goer, believes that human progress and meaning can be found in humanism and books. This is something I agree with. If you want to learn about humanity, empathy and the very nature of people as quintessential beings - you need to read books. But obviously, the protagonist believes this is a rather stupid idea and fairly reductive. Obviously Sartre's observation is that there is a terror to having no meaning in which we attach fragile meanings on to in order to not experience 'nothingness'. There is a whole next book on this and he basically wrote that one - so what is the need to tell that whole story again? I don't know but it doesn't really work out the way it's supposed to. It kind of sticks out like a sore thumb.

The fact that this leads a historian to see human memory as unreliable is rich as hell as it makes all the work he has done up until know basically pointless. He also has a physical disgust towards the material world, but keeps going to work in order to earn money because he has to pay for things - so there's that. (There is no wonder to why Sartre is regarded today as a Communist philosopher...I mean no wonder!) But this is also going on whilst that sensory detachment of the nausea is still happening, illustrating quite a twisted but deep thought about existentialism as being not feeling at home in your home or your skin, or anywhere really. Obviously, this moves towards the 'empowerment' narrative because why would it not? I mean I have a whole conflict with the ideas presented in this book purely because they aren't helpful to the average person.

I think the term for them today is 'luxury thoughts' or 'luxury beliefs' or something like that. Most people wouldn't even have the time or space to think about this. Even Sartre's Communism is flawed.

Anyways, that's all from me. And all in all, I have to say that though there are some things I agree with in this book, there are also many tangents where I feel like I can't agree. I would definitely say read the book if you're into existentialism, but as for philosophy I prefer Kierkegaard.

***

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