43 pages • 1 hour read
Jean-Paul SartreNausea
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1938A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 126-178Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 126-178 Summary
Antoine’s nausea is constantly with him after his argument with the Self-Taught Man. Words have become “feeble points of reference” for Antoine, who no longer believes that words can convey existence or meaningful information about objects (127). Antoine realizes that all of existence is contingent, or circumstantial and brought about by random happenstance. Antoine’s final attack of nausea and anxiety occurs in a park, where he fixates on a tree root. The tree root makes him realize that the word “root” is a meaningless human construction to lump together existing things. For an existentialist like Antoine, the things lumped together under “root” exist before the word and human pattern recognition. This pre-existence before language means that language is a way of enforcing meaning and habit on something chaotic and meaningless. This leads Antoine to discover the “naked World” stripped of meaning before he visits Anny (134).
Several days later, Antoine visits Anny in Paris. He immediately notices she is a completely different person than the Anny of five years ago. Anny once decorated her hotel rooms with heaps of personal items, customizing them with her presence. Now she leaves them exactly as she finds them without a single personal decoration. Anny is no longer concerned with “perfect moments,” like she was in the past. Her perfect moments were scenes composed to make lasting memories that would give life meaning. Anny is a theatrical woman who used to act. Acting in plays once gave her proximity to these perfect moments, but she is now disillusioned by them. Anny lives now simply because she must. Like Antoine, she has no purpose in life and does not pretend to be looking for one.
Antoine believes Anny is affected by “the Nausea” as well. Anny, on the other hand, believes there’s nothing in common between the two of them. Anny is disappointed that Antoine has changed, believing he was her “milestone” that would allow her to judge the change in her own person over time (137). Since Antoine has changed, Anny cannot gauge how she has changed, and vice versa. Both people are left without a unit to measure their own characteristics. The two part ways, realizing they have little in common and nothing to say to one another. Both of them are isolated and alone but cannot reconnect.
Antoine returns to Bouville, unsure of what to do with himself. He grows afraid of cities and their artificiality, while he simultaneously fears the newfound freedom he has. He cannot stand the rhythm of city life that treats its habits like a given rule of the universe. Without Anny and without Rollebon, Antoine has no purpose in life and must find a new one. Antoine decides to move back to Paris.
Before he leaves Bouville, Antoine sees the Self-Taught Man one more time in the library. Antoine cannot speak to him after their argument and his sudden departure from their lunch. Instead, Antoine watches from afar as the Self-Taught Man lures in schoolboys at the library and attempts to prey on them. Antoine attempts to warn the Self-Taught Man that he is going to be caught, but he does not listen. He is caught by the librarian, who assaults the Self-Taught Man for preying on the children. The librarian throws the Self-Taught Man out. Antoine attacks the librarian to defend the Self-Taught Man. The Self-Taught Man does not notice or thank Antoine. He limps off into the city and Antoine never sees him again. Antoine believes the incident will be the Self-Taught Man’s awakening to the inherent meaninglessness of the world. Antoine hopes it will help the Self-Taught Man realize that the humanists led him astray.
Antoine waits for his train to leave Bouville in the Railwaymen’s Rendezvous. He says goodbye to the staff and the café owner, whom he was sleeping with, and realizes that Bouville will continue on without him. He asks the waitress to put on his favorite record and play it several times. The music brings a spark of joy to Antoine, which he has not felt in a long time since the nausea set in. Antoine muses over what he will do with his life next and decides he should write fiction.
Pages 126-178 Analysis
Antoine’s nausea reaches an apogee on pages 126-178. On his final day before reuniting with Anny, he visits a Bouville park and has another attack of nausea. As was already noted, Sartre conceived of nausea as the mood that arises from awareness of contingency, the radical randomness of the universe. In the park, the simple idea of a tree root being black causes Antoine to realize that “black” as a concept does not exist: There are things that humans call black, but tree roots and black cats, for example, share nothing in common in their mutually distinct existences. Antoine calls sight “an abstract invention, a simplified idea, one of man’s ideas” (131). The assertion that sight is an “abstract invention” means that sight, and all senses, are subject to overlaying essence on the discrete existences we observe. The existence of the tree root in the park is too immense, or “too much” (131). Antoine’s nausea is his realization that underneath the word “root,” there is an existence that is too much for words to accurately contain. Antoine describes this as seeing “the naked World suddenly revealing itself” (134). Since words are a core part of essence, Antoine becomes suspicious of their ability to convey much of meaning about the world as it exists.
Antoine renounces his biographical study, asserting that “an existant can never justify the existence of another existant” (178). He turns to writing fiction instead. Antoine believes that writing purely in the realm of essence, without pretending to use writing to understand the historical past, might allow him to accept himself (178). He believes that writing a work of fiction and reflecting back on it will allow him to repair his connection to his past from a future vantage point.
Antoine decides that he must contain his writing to the realm of fiction because his future self will have the ability to clarify and reconnect to his own past. Restraining his writing to the realm of creative imagination is a way for Antoine to rectify his own bad faith behavior: The realm of the speculative and imagination is in authentic keeping with his views on words, objects, and existence. Antoine is deciding how to construct his life’s purpose in accordance with his revelations from Bouville. As an existentialist hero, Antoine is deciding how to shape himself in accordance with his freedom in a radically contingent world without lying to himself.
Antoine’s disappointing reunion with Anny worsens his loneliness while heightening his sense of freedom. After Anny leaves, Antoine returns to Bouville and remarks, “I am free: there is absolutely no more reason for living […] My past is dead. […] Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death” (156-57). Antoine believes he does not have the strength to start a new life again and is resigned to his “death” (156). Antoine’s relationship with freedom interrogates the connection between total freedom and human bonds. Though many human relationships have been shown throughout the novel to be hollow and operate on bad faith, Antoine still craves them: He is still a person, and he still needs other people. Antoine’s decision to write a novel on the final page of Nausea is couched in relation to other people. Antoine only wishes to write the novel because he imagines other people picking up the novel and admiring his existence in the way he admires the existence of the singer in his favorite jazz song. Sartre argues that Antoine’s loneliness requires a sacrifice of some portion of his complete freedom. Through Antoine’s existential journey, Sartre suggests that the only way to avoid bad faith and hollow living is to be aware that one is sacrificing one’s freedom to connect to others and recognize for what purpose that freedom is being sacrificed.
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