La Nausée Reading Order

La Nausée (Nausea, 1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre is a philosophical novel in the form of a diary kept by Antoine Roquentin, a historian who has come to the provincial town of Bouville (modelled on Le Havre, where Sartre was teaching) to complete a biography of the Marquis de Rollebon. Over the course of the novel Roquentin begins to experience episodes of overwhelming nausea — not illness but a metaphysical revelation: the sudden, vertiginous perception that things simply exist, that existence has no reason, no essence, no purpose, and that the solidity and reassurance of the everyday world is a fiction that consciousness imposes on a fundamentally contingent reality. The nausea is the experience of contingency — of being confronted with the brute thereness of a chestnut root, a hand, a glass of beer — without any comforting framework to make sense of it. La Nausée is the first full statement of what would become Sartrean existentialism: the distinction between being-in-itself (things, which simply are) and being-for-itself (consciousness, which is always negating and projecting); the idea that existence precedes essence; the nausea as the moment when the gap between these two modes of being is felt in the body. The novel is also, on its surface, a beautifully rendered portrait of provincial life, boredom, loneliness, and a particular kind of male intellectual isolation.