43 pages • 1 hour read
Nausea
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Character Analysis
Antoine Roquentin
Antoine Roquentin is the protagonist of Nausea. The novel is framed as diary entries he wrote over several weeks at the beginning of 1932. Antoine is a reclusive, 30-year-old historian staying in the city of Bouville to research the historical (and fictional) 18th-century aristocrat the Marquis de Rollebon. Antoine becomes increasingly alienated from the people and the city around him as the novel progresses. Antoine is indecisive, frozen by all the freedom he possesses; he is arrogant, believing he alone understands the truth about existence and that nobody else around him does; he is also unable to connect with the people around him due to his assumed superiority.
Antoine becomes increasingly isolated as the novel progresses. His only consistent human contact occurs with Françoise, the owner of the Railwaymen’s Rendezvous, and Ogier P., the Self-Taught Man. Antoine has sexual relationships with a few other unnamed women, such as the owner of the Rendezvous des Cheminots. Antoine’s revelations about existence cause him to view his relationships with these women with increasing disgust. He begins dehumanizing them by using metaphor to make their bodies inhuman. The woman at the Cheminots becomes “a small garden with low, wide trees on which immense hairy leaves were hanging” that is overrun with ants, centipedes, and other repulsive creatures (59). Likewise, the Self-Taught Man’s hand is a “fat white worm” (4). Antoine cannot make physical contact with people without likening their bodies to the most repulsive aspects of the natural world, with women bearing the brunt of the repulsive imagery of the novel. These metaphors of the natural world, often closely tied to sexual imagery, both dehumanize everybody around Antoine and severely isolate him.
Antoine’s isolation is associated with his increasing sense of freedom. Antoine is a well-off man: He doesn’t need to work to support himself, and he has no familial or societal obligations. After deciding to not work on his book about Rollebon, Antoine realizes that the freedom he has found is “rather like death” (157). The comparison to death means that Antoine is not truly living, despite his ability to do whatever he pleases. Without connections to other people, without Anny or the Self-Taught Man or his passion for Rollebon, Antoine’s freedom has no purpose. Antoine’s character arc is one of increasing loneliness that is measured by a paradoxical increase in freedom.
Self-Taught Man
Ogier P., referred to by Antoine as the Self-Taught Man, is a clerk that spends all of his free time educating himself in the library where Antoine conducts his research. He is an avowed humanist and member of the French Socialist Party. Ogier’s rigorous self-teaching has led him to adopting ideas of humanism, as well as a love for the working class that has led him to socialism. Ogier believes socialism is an extension of humanism: He loves all of humanity because of their inherent worth. Ogier is revealed at the end of the novel to be a pedophile: He preys on young boys in the library where he learns, despite knowing he will one day be caught.
Ogier is an ideological foil to Antoine and a stand-in for Sartre’s ideological opponents. Ogier’s views allow Sartre to directly confront humanism within Nausea. Antoine exposes Ogier’s love for humanity as a love for an abstract idea. When the two are having lunch, Ogier claims to love everybody in the diner. When Antoine asks him what the color of a woman’s hair is who is sitting behind Ogier, Ogier cannot remember (119-20). The dialogue between Antoine and Ogier allows Sartre to frame humanism as a love for an abstract idea, rather than the concrete existence of people and their bodies. Ogier’s hypocrisy is shown clearly by the mixing of his learning with preying on children. Sartre uses Ogier’s abuse of children to argue that humanists have a love for ideas instead of the genuine people underneath their ideas. This allows Sartre to position his existentialism through Antoine as a more genuine humanism that cares about the existence of people. Sartre was himself a socialist and uses the Self-Taught Man’s relationship to Antoine to show that existentialism is a more authentic way to approach the politics of socialism than abstract humanism.
Anny
Anny is Antoine’s ex-lover and love interest. Like Antoine, she used to travel the world. Anny is a theatrical, carefree woman who once built her life around chasing “perfect moments” (62). Anny wanted memories and moments that held profound emotional resonance after the actual moment had passed. In the present day, Anny is disillusioned with her “perfect moments” and lives simply to exist. She is now surrounded by “dead passions” (145). Anny, like Antoine, feels a kind of disgust at the world around her and the existence of objects.
Anny is the only person with whom Antoine feels he can connect. After abandoning his project on Rollebon, Antoine is desperate to re-connect with Anny and find a new purpose in life. Antoine’s meeting with Anny ends in failure: The two of them have drifted too far apart, and Anny does not see any similarity between their struggles. Anny serves two functions within Nausea: She is a memory of the past that allows Antoine to make sense of his present, and present-day Anny illustrates the extreme isolation and loneliness that existentialist realizations can cause.
Antoine’s memories of past Anny explore the relationship between history and memory. Antoine remembers her a specific way and has difficulty accepting the fact that she has changed. Anny always decorated her hotel rooms with her belongings, festooning the room with her personality. Now, Anny doesn’t decorate a single thing in her hotel rooms, leaving Antoine shocked (136). Past Anny and present Anny are two different people that answer to the name “Anny.”
Present-day Anny is heavily implied to suffer from nausea the same way Antoine does. However, Anny refuses camaraderie and comparison between herself and Antoine: She does not think they are the same (151) and wishes Antoine hadn’t changed, either. Anny refers to him as a “milestone,” a kind of permanent road marker that would allow her to situate her present self and the changes she has experienced (143). Because both people have changed and the present version of the other is different from their memories, they are both left without the ability to understand their present self. Sartre suggests through Anny that we use fixed, idealized versions of others in our memory to understand ourselves and how we change over time. Anny and Antoine’s loss of their “milestone” in the other leaves them with no choice but to part ways in an anti-climactic fashion, more alone after their meeting than before.
Bouville
Like many Modernist novels, Nausea is a city novel. City novels are novels that pay great attention to the city environment its characters live in; the city is a character in its own right. Bouville (“Mud Town”) is based heavily on Le Havre, a port city in the Normandy region of northern France. Sartre lived and worked in Le Havre while he wrote Nausea. Bouville is a reflection of the real city’s politics and character.
Bouville is a highly class-stratified city. Antoine frequents the Couteau Vert on weekends, a neighborhood that is currently being gentrified by the upper classes of the Boulevard Maritime (44). The gentrification began when the mayor’s wife had a vision of a church for Sainte Cécile, which was built halfway between the Couteau Vert and the Maritime Boulevard. The presence of this church began an encroachment of shops and services catering to the richer families of the Maritime Boulevard. The last hold-out of the lower-class Couteau Vert stores was a shop that sold insecticides. In the present day of the novel, the store closed two years ago. The insecticide store “recalled the rights of dirt and vermin, only two paces from the most costly church in France” (43). The insecticide store is an allegory for the tenacity of the original inhabitants of the Couteau Vert who resist the gentrification brought on by the church. Despite the desires of the upper class, remnants of the lower classes exist in the Couteau Vert.
Bouville is a highly artificial city. When Antoine returns from visiting Anny in Paris, he describes Bouville’s greenery as “castrated, domesticated, [and] so fat that they are harmless” (156). Antoine thinks this makes Bouville “horrible” (156). Sartre frequently uses sexual imagery to make objects and bodies (especially scenes of nature) seem disgusting as Antoine’s nausea sets in. Castration, or the lack of ability to sexually reproduce, makes the city seem as if it is intentionally constructed in a way unnatural to its inhabitants and plant life. Sartre uses the lack of sexuality—the removal of reproductive parts—to not only portray Antoine’s disgust but also make the city seem artificial. This city is “engulfed in nature” when nature is often sexualized by Sartre. The “castration” of nature within the city is an analogy for the veneer of meaning that hides the raw reality of existence. Like the gentrified neighborhood or the library, nature within the city is carefully cultivated and sculpted to give people a certain sense of how life should be lived. Sartre portrays the city as highly artificial to suggest that it is, in some way, a cage that keeps people from experiencing Antoine’s existentialist isolation.
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By Jean-Paul Sartre
