Nausea
A historian travels to a French port town to research a biography, but instead finds himself consumed by existential dread. His senses dull, and he grows increasingly disgusted with his own existence, finding no comfort in relationships or his work. This journal-style novel explores profound feelings of alienation and the search for meaning.
A solitary historian living in the port town of Bouville, whose diary records his growing dread at the sheer, unaccountable strangeness of physical existence.
A bailiff's clerk reading his way alphabetically through every book in the municipal library, driven by an earnest, humanist faith in knowledge and human progress.
Roquentin's former lover, an English actress he reunites with in Paris after years apart, still chasing the vivid "perfect moments" that once defined their romance.
An eighteenth-century French political figure and diplomat, the subject of the biography Roquentin has spent years researching in the Bouville municipal library.
The proprietress of the Rendezvous des Cheminots, a café near the station where Roquentin is a regular and one of the few people he has any real intimacy with.
Not literally, but it draws on it. Sartre wrote the novel while teaching philosophy in Le Havre in the early 1930s, and the book's setting, the port town of Bouville, is a fictionalized stand-in for that city. Roquentin's crisis is philosophical rather than a transcription of Sartre's own life, but the town, its library and its cafés are drawn from the place Sartre was living in as he wrote it.
It names the recurring physical and psychological sensation the narrator, Antoine Roquentin, feels when the sheer, unjustified existence of ordinary things — a stone, a tree root, his own hand — presses in on him. It's Sartre's way of dramatizing the philosophical idea of contingency: the discovery that things (and people) simply exist, for no reason, rather than being there for some purpose.