NAUSEA by JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

"I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous existences. But even my death would have been superfluous. Superfluous, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the bottom of this smiling garden. And the gnawed flesh would have been superfluous in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, peeled, as clean as teeth, it would have been superfluous: I was superfluous for eternity."

Personal rating: 10/10

Imagine this: one warm, humid afternoon, you're on your way from work to home, its 3pm in the afternoon and you're restless because 3PM is either too early to do anything, or too late. But as you walk, you come across a muddy puddle where you see a stone lying, covered in mud. You pick it up with your hands and see that the top portion is clean and dry while the lower portion is muddy and wet. And suddenly, you feel like that lifeless stone is transmitting the lifelessness and dirt into you through your hands, and you feel it, you feel like vomiting, and there it is! There you feel it, the slight Nausea right in the palm of your hand.

The story is about Antoine Roquentin, a middle aged man, who is working on a history book, and is suffocated with everything and everyone around him. He is hopeless and. lives in his absurd way where he is constantly attacked by these episodes of Nausea.

He has no friends, not any particular close relations which he talks of, apart from Anny, who used to be his lover in the past. He has only one so called friend, whom he calls the Autodidact. The Autodidact turns out a self-learned humanist, with clashing ideas with Roquentin.

He visits his past when he recieves a letter from Anny and went to meet her only to be the leftover hope taken away from him. I shall quote:

"My past is dead, Monsieur de Rollebon is dead, Anny came back only to take all hope away from me. I am alone in this white street lined with gardens. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death."

After the episode with his past love, Anny, Roquentin was so depressed that, I won't lie, it made me, as a reader feel depressed. He says: "I am not just terribly depressed at leaving her; I am terribly frightened of going back into my solitude."

That line hit me, as it would to any reader, with an acute understanding.

It felt like an urge to weep, a sudden sadness struck me; as if a bright light was shone right to my face and I had to look away from it, from the cause, the source; it was a blinding light, so much so that I had to look away and weep in the darkness.

That's how it hit me.

I think, we all feel this Nausea that Sartre is trying to explain here, only we couldn't understand it. He calls this Nausea as episodes in which, afflicted by his sense, that there is 'absolutely no reason for living', he is simultaneously alienated or overimmersed in reality.

Antoine Roquentin, like Dostoevsky's Underground Man, is a sufferer and a militant. He is at war with the town in which he lives, at war with the regulars at his café, at war with Anny and the Autodidact, and at war with himself, or with pieces of himself. He is like a solipsist, trapped in a terrible echo-chamber of the self, haunted by the sonics of his inflamed personality.

Moreover, he is everybody, a little by little, and we do feel his Nausea too, only we don't recognize it.

To Sartre, existentialism is, the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism.

If Camus was a tragic religionist, Sartre was a providential atheist.

Camus asked us to fight the daily Sisyphean imprisonment, if necessarily wearing and repetitively; Sartre hoped that we could simply explode the very whole prison.

Some of these days

You'll miss me honey.

Thank you for reading.