Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

I have read this  classic novel   ( Nausea : 253 pages: Penguin Modern Classics)by Jean-Paul Sartre   three times. Each reading gave me more meaning and more joy. Written in 1938 , it  has had a powerful impact on literature as well as philosophy. It belongs to existential genre of literature.

        It is the story of Antoine Roquentin , a French writer  completing his historical research  on the Marquis de Rollebon. The book is in the form of a diary. Antoine  is a  critical  thinker and  a lonely person , who struggles to come to terms with his life .In his solitude , he   tries to discover the meaning of life but  when he does not succeed ,  he becomes  overwhelmed with an  intolerable awareness of his  purposeless existence , which he calls nausea. He has no dearth of money and stays in a hotel  in Marseille in France to do his research .

               One character  called Autodidact   ( also called Ogier P-), who was a bailiif’s clerk and whose acquaintance  Roquentin had made  at the Bouville library , is frequently mentioned in the book .Autodidact is The Self Taught Man (STM) and  frequently discusses  life and its meaning with Roquentin. Autodidact does not agree that there is no meaning in life .Rather he confronts his despair  by turning into a Humanist. Before that , he   reads  all the books in the library , one by one  but the way he reads ( books   selected  with authors’  names   alphabetically, irrespective of the subject) . Such a knowledge does not give  him  any satisfaction  . As a humanist , he wants to go to help  and  serve other human beings. Autodidact is the symbol of everything  that has gone wrong with our education and our society. He keeps working towards a goal . Once one goal is reached, he needs to create a new one  for himself. The again and again .This approach looks at life as a series of goals .To Antoine , it feels  as  though  such an unexamined  life  is all quite pointless. Most of us approach life  in a way similar to  Autodidact’s  approach. It is a life  which is not examined because of endless pursuit of trivial knowledge and   material goals. This is the   question which   this book  Nausea    forces us to confront.

           In its final pages,  Nausea is not a book without solution .Sartre says that  our happiness is in our hands only. Only we can   justify ,create and give meaning to our lives. But such a meaning  cannot come out of writing a history book.(“history talks about  what has existed –an existent can never justify  the existence of another existent” ).It has to be some thing   which was above existence , which could make people  ashamed of their existence. It could help him  in accepting himself.

              Sartre speaks right to our soul. His style is intimate and beautiful. This is the kind of book  we could  and should read again and again, discovering some new meaning or detail every time . It is serious work of literature and some people may   find it a heavy read . So , if you  like serious literature and   wish to be  different from Ogier P-, I strongly recommend this book for you.