Nausea (novel)

Disgust ( French La nausée, see also Medical: feeling sick) is a novel by Jean -Paul Sartre. He appeared in 1938 and is considered a major novel of existentialism.

The author describes the experience of an individual ( the narrator Antoine Roquentin ) with its existence in a world of concepts and fixed structures. Through a constant rewriting of existing things around him he feels a strong dislike: disgust.

In his first novel, in which Sartre worked for five years, already many topics are included which will become clearer in his later philosophical works. The book is a collection of diary entries of the narrator Roquentin, who tried to be clear about the disgust that creeps over him for some time.

Content

Antoine Roquentin is a historian who lives in a small town called Bouville and there wrote a historical book about the diplomatic Rollebon, in which he currently provides the only justification for its existence. This disgust he feels more in the things themselves, leaving him just listening to a hit song: "Some of these days you'll miss me, honey ." The cause of disgust is the senselessness and randomness of its existence. Only the combination of circumstances, the irreversibility of events - he remembers doing on his adventures - makes him happy. Novels, stories and art, these things made, cause him through the rigor of their shape luck. At the same time can Roquentin Sartre just question his own existence at the sight of a painting:

Real life, however, the passage of days, the coming and going of people has, for Roquentin no need. Only when one tells the life, this is changing. The futility of existence is Roquentin conscious at the sight of a root in the park. Although you know what the function of a root is generally, but for the existence of this single root there is no explanation. In contrast, there is completely explainable, for example, a circle, is not. The existence therefore can not be derived from a being, she precedes essence. At the end of the book Roquentin makes the decision to give up his life as a historian and instead of writing a novel to give themselves in service to the strict form of a justification as an artist.

Life has lost for the hero all the vulgarity. He constantly experiencing new moments of his meaningless existence. At the end of his novel, Sartre suggests a hope that is referred to as the contingency, ie the inner finiteness of existence, which manifests itself in the fact that this very existence also could not be otherwise or at all. Even if the existence is lonely and therefore also free to the individual in this world has to reinvent itself and can also free to decide what it wants to be.