Recommendations
Books Like Nausea
What to read after Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) is the novel that made existentialism feel like a physical condition — Antoine Roquentin's diary of his discovery that things exist without reason, without necessity, and without meaning. If you were drawn to its philosophical intensity and its refusal of consolation, these works will find you in the same territory.
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The Stranger
by Albert Camus
The essential companion to Nausea — Meursault, who kills an Arab on a beach and cannot explain why; where Roquentin discovers the contingency of existence in a provincial French city, Meursault acts as though existence is always already contingent and is destroyed for his inability to pretend otherwise; the two novels are the founding texts of French existentialist fiction
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Josef K. arrested without explanation — Kafka's nightmare vision that Sartre read before writing Nausea; where Nausea is a philosophical diary of existential experience, The Trial is a narrative in which the institutional world enacts the same arbitrariness that Roquentin discovers in the existence of things
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The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa transformed into a monstrous insect — the concentrated version of the same discovery Roquentin makes; Kafka's transformation is physical and inexplicable, Sartre's is philosophical and argued, but both portray a man for whom the ordinary social world has become suddenly alien and unmanageable
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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Underground Man arguing against the Crystal Palace from his underground room — the nineteenth-century predecessor to Nausea; Dostoevsky's narrator refuses the rationalist optimism of his era with the same intensity that Roquentin refuses the comfortable assumptions of his bourgeois environment; both are first-person notebooks of a man who cannot fit
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Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual who stands outside bourgeois society and cannot reconcile his own inner division — the German existentialist companion to Nausea; Hesse is writing about the same crisis of meaning in the same period (Steppenwolf was published in 1927), from a more mystical and less analytical angle than Sartre
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The Castle
by Franz Kafka
K.'s endless, fruitless attempts to reach the Castle — the fullest Kafka exploration of the arbitrariness that Nausea diagnoses philosophically; where Roquentin describes the contingency of existence, K. enacts it in his attempts to find a rational entry point into an irrational system
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
A Black man in America who is invisible to the white world around him — an existentialist novel in the American tradition; Ellison was reading the French existentialists while writing Invisible Man, and its underground narrator, writing in a basement lined with light bulbs, is directly in conversation with the tradition Nausea belongs to
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
Tomas and Tereza in Prague before and after the Soviet invasion of 1968 — Kundera's novel asks the existentialist question in a specifically political key: if everything happens only once and therefore as if it had never happened, what does moral responsibility mean? The most direct heir to the tradition Sartre and Camus founded, written from behind the Iron Curtain
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