NAUSEA

An existential novel

By Jean-Paul Sarte

EXISTENTIAL MOTIFS
Discontinuity
Singularity
Alienation
Anxiety
Nothingness
Absurdity
Authenticity
Freedom

THE EXISTENTIAL IMAGINATION

A postmodern imagination, refusing to fulfill causally oriented
expectations.
A critique of the positivism of progress.
Ambiguity, uncertainty, indefiniteness.
A withdrawal of God - a withdrawal of an understanding of the world
as a web of defined objects and the disclosure of the rawness of
existence.
Emphasis of the subject, who is needed to fill in the gaps between
these discontinuities in the external world that dislocate.

DISCONTINUITY OF LANGUAGE
Nausea : A novel of de-composition.
Subversion of plot, to generate anxiety and dread, to dislodge the
individual from complacency with the surrounding world.
The movement away from a language of continuity (& referentiality).
The acceptance of a discourse which acknowledges linguistic,
intellectual, and social discontinuities: no deterministic plot.
Roquentin, whose existential search we witness as a trying to make
sense of, to identify, and to find meaning by objectifying the world
around him.
The discontinuity of meaning is evoked in language.

SINGULARITY
For Roquentin, the world of explanations and reasons is not the
world of existence.
To exist is always to confront the question of meaning.
According to Sarte, meaning is decided in and through existing itself:
what one becomes, what one makes of oneself.
Man is a being which exists before being defined by any concept.
pp. 4, 6, 10, 16, 19

ALIENATION
What is there to fear in such a regular world? (Sarte, N, 3).
The estrangement of the self from the world and from oneself.
The otherness of the world, in which I do not feel at home.
That there is nothing to hold on to, but rather an inconsumable external
reality.
The groundlessness of the world of meaning in which I must confront my
own finitude (nothingness) I am not anything, but must create myself.
pp. 2, 4, 10-11, 16-18

ANGST
The Nausea
In each instance, a disruption.
A fictional event symbolizing an existential sickness.
Has nothing as its object.
An indefiniteness, an ambiguity, of what we dread, of what causes
Roquentins nausea . An impossibility of defining the what.
A phenomenological symptom of subjectivity.
Roquentin confronts a world that will no longer be assimilated.

THE ABSURD
Roquentins futile search for meaning, unity, clarity in the face of an
unintelligible world devoid of god and values.
His illumination that the nausea is the result of the pressure of an
absurd and amorphous, but very tangible, world.
The nausea serves as a phenomenological reminder of his own
existence.
Roquentin randomly seeks a way out of a nauseating existence.
There is no meaning in the world other than the meaning we give to
it.

FREEDOM & AUTHENTICITY

Man is condemned to be free.
Man is responsible for what he is.
The choice of oneself: what is man called upon to be?
Responsibility
Heideggers thrown-ness of being : To be thrown into existence
with no definition of the reality into which one is thrown.
Authentic choice: capitulate into nothingness or endure it.