Reading Order
Nausea Reading Order
Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) is a standalone novel — there is no series and no sequel. Antoine Roquentin, a historian living in a provincial French city, becomes afflicted by a sudden, inexplicable revulsion toward the existence of things — their bare contingency, their refusal to fit any rational structure. The novel is the most direct fictional expression of Sartre's existentialist philosophy and one of the defining works of twentieth-century French literature.
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Nausea
Complete Nausea Book List
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Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre·1938·Standalone novel — Roquentin's diary of his discovery of nausea in a provincial French city; translated by Robert Baldick (Penguin, 1963) or Lloyd Alexander (New Directions, 1959); relatively short at around 250 pages; the most direct fictional expression of Sartre's existentialism - Buy
The Words
OptionalJean-Paul Sartre·1963·Sartre's autobiography — his account of his childhood and the origins of his vocation as a writer; a natural companion to Nausea for readers who want to understand Sartre's thinking in autobiographical terms; shorter and more accessible - Buy
No Exit
OptionalJean-Paul Sartre·1944·Three people in a room in hell — Sartre's most famous play and the source of 'hell is other people'; the theatrical expression of the same ideas explored in Nausea; very short (under 50 pages) and a useful companion
Nausea — Frequently Asked Questions
What is nausea in the novel?
In Sartre's novel, 'nausea' is not an ordinary feeling of physical sickness. It is a philosophical experience: Roquentin's sudden visceral awareness that things — a pebble, a chestnut root, his own hand — exist, without reason, without necessity, as brute contingencies that could as easily not exist. This awareness, which Sartre calls the experience of the 'in-itself' (the being of things without consciousness), is overwhelming and unpleasant: nothing provides the rational structure that would make existence feel necessary or meaningful. Sartre drew on the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger to give this experience a name.
Do I need to know philosophy to read Nausea?
No — Nausea is a novel, and Sartre was a skilled enough writer to make the philosophical experience viscerally immediate without requiring any background in existentialism or phenomenology. Readers who know the philosophy will recognize the concepts being dramatized, but readers who come to it fresh report that the nausea itself is communicated directly through the prose. The best approach is to read the novel first and then, if you want to understand its intellectual background, read Sartre's short essay 'Existentialism Is a Humanism' (1945).
How does Nausea relate to existentialism?
Nausea is the most direct fictional statement of the themes Sartre would systematize in Being and Nothingness (1943) and popularize in 'Existentialism Is a Humanism' (1945). The key existentialist ideas present in the novel are: existence precedes essence (Roquentin has no fixed nature or purpose); radical freedom (he must choose what to do with no rational grounds for any choice); and bad faith (the ways in which other characters avoid the nausea by pretending their lives are necessary rather than contingent). The novel was published before Sartre had fully worked out these ideas philosophically, and some readers find it the most powerful expression of them.
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