Reading Order
La Nausée Reading Order
La Nausée (Nausea, 1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre is the foundational text of French existentialist fiction — the diary of Antoine Roquentin, a historian living in Bouville (loosely based on Le Havre) who discovers that ordinary objects, situations, and people have begun to produce in him a profound physical revulsion: the nausea of contingency. The novel dramatizes the central existentialist thesis — that existence precedes essence, that the world and the self have no inherent meaning, that the apparent solidity of objects and identities is a social construction — through the concrete experience of a man whose perceptual world is dissolving. La Nausée was published the same year as Sartre's essay 'La Transcendance de l'Ego,' which provides the philosophical framework; the novel was written first and the philosophy grew from the fictional experience. It won immediate recognition as a major work and established Sartre as the dominant intellectual figure of his generation before any of his philosophical works were published.
Where to start
Read La Nausée before any of Sartre's philosophical works — the novel establishes the experiential ground from which the philosophy grows; reading the philosophy first makes La Nausée feel like a philosophical illustration, which it is not. Read Les Mots (1964) after for Sartre's later self-criticism of the literary vocation that La Nausée's ending (Roquentin considers writing a novel) embodies. L'Être et le Néant (1943) provides the full philosophical account for readers who want the theory.
Complete La Nausée Book List
- 1Buy
La Nausée
Jean-Paul Sartre·1938·Start here — the founding existentialist novel; the nausea of contingency; read before the philosophy - 2Buy
Les Mots
Jean-Paul Sartre·1964·The autobiography — Sartre's later self-criticism; reads as a direct response to La Nausée's final aspiration - 3Buy
L'Être et le Néant
Jean-Paul Sartre·1943·Being and Nothingness — the full philosophical account; read after La Nausée for those who want the theory - 4Buy
Huis clos
Jean-Paul Sartre·1944·No Exit — the play; "Hell is other people"; the most accessible version of the existentialist thesis; read after La Nausée - 5Buy
L'Étranger
Albert Camus·1942·The Stranger — the most important contemporary comparison; both are novels of alienated consciousness in provincial France; published four years later
La Nausée — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the nausea in Sartre's novel?
The nausea Roquentin experiences is the physical sensation produced by the encounter with contingency — with the fact that things exist without reason, without necessity, without justification. A chestnut root in the park produces a classic attack: Roquentin stares at it and realizes that it exists beyond all its qualities (its color, its shape, its function), that its existence is an irreducible, unjustifiable brute fact. The nausea is the body's response to this ontological discovery. Sartre's philosophical term for what produces the nausea is 'en-soi' (in-itself) — the mode of being of things, which simply are, without consciousness, without project, without freedom. The nausea is the encounter between consciousness (the pour-soi) and the in-itself.
Who is the 'Self-Taught Man' in La Nausée?
The Autodidacte (Self-Taught Man) is a minor character who embodies one of the novel's satirical targets: the person who believes that knowledge can be accumulated systematically — he is reading through the entire municipal library in alphabetical order — and who believes in human solidarity as an abstract principle. The Self-Taught Man's humanism (the belief that all human beings are connected by their humanity) is satirized by Roquentin as another form of bad faith — a way of avoiding the radical contingency of existence by adopting a ready-made sense of purpose. His later humiliation (he is thrown out of the library for touching a young boy) is one of the novel's most disturbing and morally ambiguous scenes.
What is the significance of the jazz melody in La Nausée?
Roquentin listens repeatedly to a jazz recording — 'Some of These Days,' played by a black American singer — and this melody represents the only thing in the novel that seems to escape the nausea. The melody has the quality of necessity: it could not be otherwise, it exists as a pure ideal object outside contingency. Roquentin concludes the novel by considering whether he could write a book that had this same quality — the book (the novel we are reading, implicitly) as a necessary object that would justify its own existence. The ending is ambiguous about whether this escape from contingency through art is possible or is itself a form of bad faith.
What is Bouville and why does Roquentin live there?
Bouville is Sartre's fictional version of Le Havre, a port city in Normandy where Sartre taught philosophy from 1931 to 1936. Roquentin lives in Bouville because he has come to research the biography of the eighteenth-century diplomat the Marquis de Rollebon — a project that represents the attempt to give meaning to the past (and therefore to the present) through historical research. When the project collapses (Roquentin realizes he cannot recover the 'reality' of Rollebon and has been using him as a reason to live rather than genuinely understanding him), Bouville becomes the site of pure contingency and nausea.
How does La Nausée relate to phenomenology?
Sartre studied phenomenology in Berlin (1933–34), where he read Husserl and Heidegger, and La Nausée is in many ways a phenomenological novel — it describes experience from the inside, attending to the structures of consciousness and perception rather than to external events. The nausea itself is phenomenological: it is the experience of the structure of existence, of the distinction between consciousness (which is always 'about' something) and things (which simply are). Sartre's later philosophical works — especially L'Être et le Néant (1943) — develop the phenomenological framework that La Nausée dramatizes; reading the novel and the philosophy together gives the most complete account of Sartre's thought in the 1930s and 1940s.
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