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Chapter 7: Friday
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Nausea, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Existence vs. Essence
Time
Love and Sexuality
Art and Legacy
Summary
Analysis
Roquentin goes to the Rendezvous des Cheminots to see Françoise, but when he arrives, a waitress named Madeleine tells him that she’s not there. Roquentin, dazed and disappointed, becomes lost in “the Nausea,” his name for his affliction. Through a mental fog, Roquentin observes a group of men playing cards at a nearby table. He asks Madeleine to play his favorite record, and as the music begins, Roquentin starts to feel happy. He relishes the arrival of the vocal chorus, which feels inevitable and “necessary” to him. When the chorus does start, Roquentin’s Nausea disappears and is replaced by a sort of euphoria.
Roquentin’s Nausea becomes worse when he’s thwarted from having sex with Françoise, a reaction that implies that his loneliness is one of the Nausea’s causes. Again, he observes a group of people from the outside looking in, which only underlines his aloneness more starkly. For the first time, however, he finds a new source of comfort: music. While the song is playing, Roquentin feels a heightened awareness of time as he experiences it. This leads him to think of the chorus as inevitable and necessary, and indeed, the vocal line specifically seems to temporarily cure him of his Nausea.
Themes
When the music stops, Roquentin feels disquieted again and leaves the café. The fresh air and solid stone streets make him feel a little better. As Roquentin walks down the Boulevard Noir, he observes the city around him closely. Eventually, he reaches a fence plastered with old posters and stops in a pocket of darkness between streetlights and storefronts. Although there are people drinking, playing cards, and travelling the streets nearby, there is nobody in Roquentin’s immediate surroundings. The “purity” of his aloneness soothes him.
Roquentin frequently walks the streets of Bouville while he seeks meaning and escape. In this instance, he seems relieved by the pocket of solitude he finds in the busy city. With fewer people and objects around, Roquentin has fewer existences to process. Because of this, he equates emptiness with purity (a lack of existence, or existence unencumbered by essence). Roquentin struggles with his contradictory urges: he’s lonely and wishes for genuine companionship, but other people disgust him.
Themes
A man and a woman enter the scene, yelling at each other. As Roquentin passes the woman, he realizes that it’s Lucie, and that the man is her husband, Charles. Charles snaps at her to be quiet, and Lucie begs him to come back as he walks away. Lucie looks at Roquentin without seeming to recognize him as he passes her. As Roquentin watches Lucie suffer, she stands still and touches her throat. Roquentin muses that Lucie seems like stone, matching the street setting full of hard and inanimate objects. As he leaves, he finds that he envies Lucie for the passion of her pain compared to his own “empty purity.”
Lucie’s failure to recognize Roquentin parallels his earlier inability to recognize the Self-Taught Man, but their emotional states are not the same. Rather than feeling Roquentin’s apathetic Nausea, Lucie feels overwhelmed by the sheer weight of how much she feels. The encounter suggests that even if Roquentin had a real companion to confide in—Anny, Françoise, or someone else—it likely still wouldn’t make his life happy or meaningful. Lucie’s tendency to touch her throat when feeling grief also again calls to mind the man with the neck tumor from Roquentin’s childhood memories. Like this man, Lucie is an example of someone who stands on the “outside.” Where the man is on the outside of the crowd of children and Roquentin often seems to be on the outside of all society, Lucie is on the outside of her own marriage.
Themes
