43 pages • 1 hour read
Nausea
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Pages 81-125Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 81-125 Summary
Antoine learns that Fasquelle has fallen ill with the flu, which is why he was not present in the café. To pass time while waiting for Anny’s arrival in Paris, Antoine visits the museum of Bouville. He spends his time in the art gallery where there are dozens of portraits of the city’s elites: Current and past city officials, investors, and entrepreneurs are all represented by portraits painted by various famous artists. Antoine recounts the history of the city of Bouville through the portraits, from the serious investment of the higher classes into lumber and shipping through Bouville to the elite’s strikebreaking of dock workers. The paintings cause Antoine’s nausea to return as he realizes the paintings cannot convey the past existences they are meant to represent.
Antoine believes the paintings are an enslavement of nature, filtered through each artist’s personal style. The elite in the paintings, Antoine believes, felt they had the right to exist and the right to control others. Antoine believes he and everybody else are the soldiers that enforce that right to exist for the elite. Antoine leaves the museum, upset by the exaggeration of real people that once existed in the paintings.
Antoine’s encounter with the paintings changes his perspective on his historical research. He believes research and attempts to represent Rollebon for an audience are just as fictitious and distorted as the paintings of the elite. Antoine’s nausea peaks as he realizes he never knew Rollebon, only a figment of his own imagination that he concocted. Antoine believes that there is nothing left of Rollebon in the world: Even Rollebon’s bones in his grave are no longer Rollebon. Antoine vows to stop writing on Rollebon and stabs himself in the hand to remind himself that he exists in the present. Antoine bleeds on his manuscript and undersigns it with a promise to never work on the manuscript again. He leaves the library in a daze and reads about a sexual assault/murder case in the local paper of a child, which further disconnects him from his surroundings.
Antoine goes to lunch with the Self-Taught Man several days after he stops writing. Antoine begins to feel disconnected from his surroundings and wonders how the people around him can stand to live in the roles they’ve been assigned (such as the waitress being a waitress, a couple performing the roles of boyfriend and girlfriend, etc.). Antoine and the Self-Taught Man engage in a philosophical debate as Antoine interrogates the Self-Taught Man’s identity as a humanist and socialist. Antoine believes the Self-Taught Man doesn’t love humans but the abstract idea of humanity. Antoine blames the humanists for using the Self-Taught Man and putting a smokescreen of ideas in front of his eyes. Antoine’s nausea returns violently as he becomes disgusted by the diner. He wonders what he is doing there and why nobody around him is aware of the absurdity of the social roles they are all playing. The Self-Taught Man’s admiration for humanity makes Antoine deeply ill. He stumbles out of the diner, feeling as if he isn’t human.
Antoine wanders the city and finds himself on the ocean front again. Antoine views the ocean as an analogy for his understanding of reality. He believes the surface of the ocean is what most people see and believe to be the ocean, while he understands that the dark, hidden depths underneath are the real ocean.
Pages 81-125 Analysis
Antoine’s experience in the art gallery of the museum is an excellent representation of a core concept in Sartre’s philosophy: bad faith (French: mauvaise foi). Bad faith is a term Sartre coined in 1943 in his book Being and Nothingness. Bad faith occurs when an existence that is radically free to do whatever it pleases allows its freedom to be destroyed by pressure to conform to outside sources. Bad faith occurs precisely when a person conforms to these pressures to restrict their freedom while believing it must occur. For Sartre, the “badness” seeps in once a person believes they have no other choice but to conform to something that destroys their sense of self as a free being. The way the ruling class portrays themselves and conducts their behavior in Bouville society is a classic case of Sartre’s bad faith. Sartre uses bad faith to explain why people do not spontaneously become existentialists.
When Antoine feels disconnected from the people in the paintings, he realizes that they are disconnected on a psychological level: The people in the paintings believe they have certain rights while Antoine realizes nobody has a right to anything (84). Antoine’s use of “rights” isn’t akin to modern usage of the term as shorthand for dignity of the individual and their autonomy. “Rights” in Sartre’s philosophical context means natural entitlement to something by decree of the natural order, often solely for the upper classes and men in a patriarchal, capitalist society like Bouville. Antoine understands all life as contingent happenstance: Nobody can have rights when everything is meaningless because there is no “natural” order to humanity. The elite of Bouville believe that they have “the right to be well brought up, in a united family, the right to inherit a spotless name, a prosperous business” and so on (84). The elite of Bouville believe that the specific socioeconomic conditions that grant them these rights are akin to a law of the universe (like gravity) instead of contingent on a particular time and geographical location on earth. The upper classes live with this conception of rights and pass it on to their children, restricting their freedom as conscious, contingent individuals. This conformity to the rights of the elite is bad faith and crushes their ability to exist freely in the world.
Antoine uses military metaphors to emphasize the destructive conformity of bad faith present in the art gallery. Antoine feels he is the center of attention for every painting in the room, each a leader and many of them military generals. Antoine wonders who their soldiers are and recognizes that he is one of their soldiers (86). The military metaphor connotes both violence and extreme conformity. Antoine’s self-identification as a soldier for the “right to exist” of the upper classes means that he and others are expected to act with extreme conformity and violence to realize the demands of their generals (the upper classes), much like a military unit would.
The bad faith exhibited in the art gallery informs all of Antoine’s experiences within Bouville. When Antoine’s nausea hits, he becomes acutely aware of his own bad faith and the bad faith of the people around him. During his lunch with the Self-Taught Man, Antoine watches an anonymous young couple go through the motions of dating and getting accustomed to dating. He writes:
They are young and well built, they have enough to last them another thirty years. So they’re in no hurry, they delay and they are not wrong. Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence. Still…is it absolutely necessary to lie? I glance around the room. What a comedy! (111)
Bad faith appears to Antoine as a comedy and a lie. The couple is performing a “spectacle” that is “mechanical” and habitual, in accordance with what Bouville society tells them dating and courtship should look like (111). Antoine’s realization that he is surrounded by people playing hollow roles brings his nausea back. Bad faith is at the heart of the thematic conflicts and struggles Antoine faces throughout Nausea. The socially approved courtship between the couple is built on an appeal to a normative way of socializing and building relationships between people. Antoine’s use of descriptive language that connotes artifice and machines casts the bad faith of Bouville society as an essence: The essence is just as artificial as a mechanical instrument. Like Rogé’s diagnosis of Achille, bad faith in the diner is used to soothe anxiety about an uncertain and absurd world.
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By Jean-Paul Sartre
