Summary
Antoine Roquentin, an isolated aspiring biographer, inhabits Bouville (mud town) like a ghost. “Nausea” by Sartre is not so much a story as it is an attempt to let the reader have an experience. Roquentin’s alienation provides the space to observe, producing the typical results of social critique. Yet, he goes beyond this to grapple with the existence of things in general.
Thoughts
This book will have a very hit-or-miss reception among readers. It can be easily dismissed as another case of a melancholic Frenchman who needs to spend more time in the sun. When I picture Antoine, he is quite pale, so those readers would probably be correct. However, for my friends who don’t know when to stop asking questions, this book will give you a few more.
In the book’s most famous scene, Antoine encounters a chestnut tree in a park (shout out to “The Overstory”) and experiences what can best be described as a derealization. The Buddha gained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree, providing an interesting mirror to better understand Roquentin’s experience. For the Buddha, the tree represents the world axis, a center of the universe, if you will, a point at which all meaning comes together into perfect unity. For Roquentin, the tree plays a completely opposite role; it is the center of an impact. The roots are not holding things together but are cracks signaling the collapse of all signification.
Before this climactic derealization, Sartre anticipates it with a series of smaller dissolutions with varying degrees of success. One of my favorites is the contrast he creates between a life lived vs. a life retold. His claim is that all stories told claim to start at the beginning when, in reality, they can only start at the end. The meaning of the story is the end of it, and it is this end that allows the story to begin. For example, if I were to tell you a story about Van Gogh and said, “It was 1887, Van Gogh was lying awake staring at the ceiling,” the end is packaged into the beginning in a way that is completely alien to lived experience. We hear of him lying in bed, yet we know he was a brilliant artist, and so the act of staring at the ceiling is laced with a meaning that would have been completely absent from the actual experience because we know that the story is going somewhere. In our own experience, we forget this, and so we feel that perhaps we ourselves are not lying in bed awake in quite the right way because it has yet to lead to such an interesting story.
In conclusion, it feels necessary to place my flag in the Camus vs. Sartre debate, and I find myself squarely on the side of Camus. Sartre’s ideas may be just as good or better than Camus’, but he never comes close to touching Camus’ prose. A really good book with a very unique atmosphere. It felt somewhat similar to wearing sunglasses that allowed you to see the world with a Roquentin filter superimposed for a few hours. That in itself is an achievement.
#book
#nausea #sartre #existentialism #antoine_roquentin #social_critique #derealization #philosophical_novel #camus_vs_sartre #literary_analysis #meaning_of_life #french_literature
People/Jean-Paul Sartre