Will I love Nausea?

As a teenager I was struggling to understand the absurdities of life, and then I read Nausea, and found what I was looking for.

This is Sartre’s existential philosophy through fiction. It makes it readable and understandable to the layman and is a compelling psychological study of a breakdown brought on by the absurdity of life. It serves as a panacea when feeling overwhelmed by the fruitlessness of existence, from the absurdity of mortality to the solution to finding a sense of purpose.

It gets into the guts of the mental trauma of questioning anything and everything. Fortunately, there… show more.

Nausea does not rely on the extreme or outlandish scenarios of science fiction to explore philosophical themes. Rather, this novel is about a person’s growing malaise over his conscious relationship to objects, people, and ultimately himself. It reaches into some very fundamental aspects of our relationship to the world, and asks you to look at the mere structure of existence after all particularities (names, shapes, colors, history, etc.) are wiped away, and then asks you how you feel about it. Through an existentialist lens, it also explores certain political questions. And for those more technically interested in philosophy, the novel… show more.

Thousands of years ago – I exaggerate a little – when pre-university, I heard of Nausea from a library assistant. I warmed to Sartre’s sense of the weirdness of consciousness, surrounded by the strangeness of physical objects and conscious beings, ‘the Other.’ How to relate?

Nausea — and some very different works by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell — enabled my discovery that I was a philosopher, good or bad. It led me to university philosophy in London, then Cambridge, and the works of, Ah, Wittgenstein. One thing that I do not regret in my life is engagement with… show more.

Written in diary format, Nausea is a story about a young man, Antoine Roquentin, a writer horrified by his own existence. Many who are fascinated by art from the darker aspects of loneliness will find this short novel exhilarating. The protagonist is in an endless flux of desire, depression, sickness, and the absurdity of life. A dangerous mix that has lethal outcomes on the human psyche. Make no mistake, Sartre’s criticism and writing style is a tough read, especially for those who might feel they’ve truly never sought risk to live an interesting life. It’s a raw look into a… show more.