Their dialogue moves briskly, the scene resembling My Dinner with Andre with less banter and more neurosis. Significantly, the Self-Taught Man takes on a Crumb-like demeanor and aspect. As he listens to the Self-Taught Man’s troubles and ruminates on his own, Crumb’s Roquentin grows more Sartre-like. The characters alone, some critics suggest, imbue the book with a subtle parody. And that trouble is so vague, so metaphysical that I am ashamed of it.” Nausea, in one sense, is bourgeoise alienation, while Roquentin’s conversation partner, the Self-Taught Man, confesses a naïve humanist idealism. “I have no troubles,” thinks Roquentin in Robert Crumb’s short adaptation of the book above, “I have money like a capitalist, no boss, no wife, no children I exist, that’s all…. Though published before his many Marxist books and essays, Nauseaconnects the malaise to a certain class experience. The novel’s dramatization of Historian Roquentin’ s crisis presents a case of existential sickness as mostly involuntary. “Nausea is existence revealing itself-and experience is not pleasant to see,” he wrote in his own summary of his first book, published in 1938. In the years around the time of his death, however, existentialism was overtaken by structuralism, represented by Levi-Strauss and, one of Sartre's detractors, Michel Foucault.Sartre’s novel Nauseaintroduced his philosophical view as a form of illness to a WWII readership. He declined the award of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature 'for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.' He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. Roquentin's efforts to come to terms with life give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize the tenets of his Existentialist creed. Nausea features a French writer, Antoine Roquentin, who is horrified at his own existence, ruthlessly cataloging his every feeling and sensation, resulting in an overpowering feeling of nausea which 'spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time, the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.'

Join the Seward Park Library for a Classics Book Discussion on Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel Nausea (1938). A canonical work of existentialism philosophy and, according to Sartre himself, one of his best books.

Roquentin nausea