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Book cover of Nausea
NauseaJean-Paul Sartre

Characters in Nausea

5 characters, main characters first.

Main characters

  • Antoine Roquentin

    A solitary historian living in the port town of Bouville, whose diary records his growing dread at the sheer, unaccountable strangeness of physical existence.

Supporting characters

  • l'Autodidacte

    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.

  • Anny

    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.

  • Marquis de Rollebon

    An eighteenth-century French political figure and diplomat, the subject of the biography Roquentin has spent years researching in the Bouville municipal library.

  • Françoise

    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.