Nausea Study Guide

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. His father, a French Navy officer, died when Sartre was a young boy, and his mother consequently moved the family to Meudon, her own childhood home. Sartre was educated well the tutelage of his maternal grandfather, and he began to form an interest in philosophy early in life. He later attended elite Parisian schools: the Cours Hattemer and the École Normale Supérieur. At the latter of these institutions, he met Simone de Beauvoir, and the two eventually entered a non-exclusive romantic relationship as she became a rising star at the Sorbonne. After attaining an excellent score on his exams at the École Normale Supérieur, Sartre went on to teach at various lycées (schools for children 15-18, roughly equivalent to high school) around France. While teaching in La Havre from 1931 to 1936, he wrote Nausea. Sartre was drafted into World War II, during which he spent nine months as a German prisoner of war. Upon returning to France, he joined socialist groups and participated in underground rebellion against German occupation, sometimes authoring essays and articles for resistance newspapers. After the war, he wrote several pieces about antisemitism, racism, and hatred. Throughout the later years of his life, Sartre dedicated himself to activism over writing, even getting arrested for civil disobedience in 1968. He died in 1980 of a pulmonary edema. After his death, it became well known that Sartre, in tandem with de Beauvoir, had exhibited a pattern of grooming and sexually pursuing young teen girls.

Nausea, published in 1938, was written during the period between World War I and World War II. In the novel, the Self-Taught Man describes his experience fighting in World War I, in which he was taken prisoner in a German camp for two years. He was taken captive in 1917 and released in 1919, just after the end of the war in November 1918. The four-year war spanned the globe and was one of the most devastating events in human history. It was known at the time as the “Great War,” a name that suggests just how great the scale of human suffering was compared to anything the world had seen previously. Against this backdrop, philosophical movements like nihilism and humanism flourished and clashed with one another, and Nausea stakes its place in this landscape. Published on the eve of World War II (1939-1945), another global conflict which shocked and shook the faith of much of the world, it also unwittingly anticipates even greater crises of existence and meaning.

Nausea is frequently compared to Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), another philosophical novel originally published in French. Its protagonist, Meursault, moves through life with an apathy reminiscent of Roquentin’s. Although Camus himself did not conceive of The Stranger as an Existentialist work, critics have often labelled it such, particularly due to the fact that Camus and Sartre were acquaintances who both published essays on each other’s work. For more Existentialist writings, one might read some of Sartre’s other works, of which the foremost among them might be the play No Exit (1944) and the novel The Age of Reason (1945). Sartre’s lover and contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir, was also a major 20th-century French academic, writer, and philosopher. Her magnum opus The Second Sex (1949) explores the central thesis of Nausea through a feminist lens, outlining the historical oppression of women and asserting that women are as capable of transcending their circumstances and choosing their own destinies as their male counterparts. Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) anticipates Nausea’s first-person narrative full of impressionistic prose, contemplation of the human condition, and observation of city rhythms. Finally, those looking for a more modern take on Existentialist themes might enjoy Marie NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In (2017), a contemporary French novel in which a woman finds herself the subject of xenophobic disgust and slowly descends into despair.