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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Ocean
The ocean is a major symbol in Nausea. Its presence allows Sartre to interrogate ideas about surface appearance versus internal realities. After his lunch with the Self-Taught Man, Antoine wanders the city in a daze until he comes back to the seafront. He observes other people watching the ocean and admiring its green surface, “delicate colours, delicate perfumes,” and the “souls of spring” (124). Antoine believes that the green sea that the others observe is an illusion. He writes, “The true sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls under this thin green film made to deceive human beings. […] I see beneath it! The veneer melts […]” (124). The “thin green film” of the ocean’s surface is its essence: People see it and decide that it encapsulates the existence of the ocean. The ocean’s actual existence, however, has little to do with the surface that humans see. The ocean is full of “shining velvety scales” that “split and gape” (124). Antoine’s grotesque description of the sea suggests that the “true sea” is innately antithetical to the pleasant, green surface that the Bouville citizens admire.
The ocean is a symbol of the tension between the novel’s ideas of existence and essence. Antoine’s first encounter with nausea occurs because of the ocean. Antoine wished to throw a stone into the ocean on a normal Saturday evening and stopped. He writes, “I saw something which disgusted me, but I no longer know whether it was the sea or the stone” (2). Throwing a stone into the ocean would have broken the tension between the surface and depth: The stone would have broken through the “essence” of the ocean (its pleasant green surface) and sunk into its “existence.” Such an act would have made Antoine confront the “true sea” that lurks under the surface. The ocean facilitates the tension between flimsy ideas of an object’s surface-level essence and the object’s actual existence that resists essence.
The Marquis de Rollebon
The Marquis de Rollebon is a fictional 18th-century aristocrat. Antoine’s project to write about Rollebon turns the projected book into a symbol of meaning-making and the attribution of purpose to existence. Antoine’s life for much of the novel is built on researching Rollebon’s life and finding clues the man left behind to make sense of his life. Rollebon is the sole object that gives Antoine’s life meaning. Antoine spends virtually every minute thinking about Rollebon’s life. Antoine does not stop thinking about Rollebon even when he is engaged in sex (59). After Antoine decides to leave his manuscript unfinished, he spends the remainder of the novel lost without a purpose in life.
The motif of Rollebon serves two purposes: Antoine looks to make sense of the past through Rollebon, and Antoine tries to find purpose in his own life through Rollebon. As Antoine’s work progresses, he can only make progress in understanding Rollebon by letting his imagination run wild. Antoine spends pages dreaming up Rollebon’s mannerisms, facial expressions, and habits by way of the letters and treatises the aristocrat left behind. Antoine repeatedly catches himself filling in these gaps with fantasy. He concludes that there is no difference between him and a novel writer (58). Antoine fails to make sense of the past through Rollebon. As an existentialist, he finds that past existence is completely closed off to him. The past can only be conjured up via imagination. When Antoine concludes that he is writing something no better than a novel, he gives up on his writing and loses his purpose. His past, like the Marquis de Rollebon, is dead (156). The figurative death Antoine suffers through losing his passion for researching Rollebon represents the shifting purposes we have in life: Antoine will, presumably, find another purpose for living in Paris. Rollebon is a motif that repeatedly evokes the inability to connect to the past and establish permanent, lifelong purposes for living.
Paper
Paper is a multifaceted symbol in Nausea. Paper is central to Antoine’s life and his historical research. Antoine also has a particular fascination with paper: He likes to find pieces of decaying, ruined paper and touch them. Sartre’s juxtaposition of ruined, damaged paper against Antoine’s manuscript makes Antoine’s purpose for living look unstable and fragile. If paper can be so easily destroyed and the knowledge on it lost forever, then so can Antoine’s manuscript.
Early in the novel, Antoine finds a piece of mud-crusted, nearly destroyed paper. He rejoices at the thought of the “touch of this pulp, fresh and tender” and wants to roll it into “greyish balls,” making it something altogether different than the paper he found (10). He finds himself unable to take his usual pleasure in this activity because the paper is labeled as a dictation exam. A dictation (French: dictée) is a language-learning exercise in which a teacher reads a passage of text and students transcribe it. Students are graded based on the accuracy of their transcription. Antoine feels that the text “touches” him, which objects should not do (10). Antoine is “touched” because the paper, despite its degradation, reminds him of its prior use before he shreds it into pulpy balls. Antoine’s first encounter with paper in the novel portrays paper as a dangerous object, one that can touch back.
The dangerousness of paper is a symbolic struggle between existence and essence. Antoine wishes to reduce the paper down to what it “really” is: wood pulp. The words written on it are an essence: Dictation exams do not exist anywhere but inside the human mind. Despite the paper’s state of decay and filth, it still conveys some of the essence that was stamped on it. The disconnect between the material of the paper and the abstract ideals it is utilized for causes Antoine’s nausea to appear. Paper is a dangerous object to Antoine because it represents his struggle to understand the relationship between existence and essence.
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