Nausea

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.