Nausea, by Sartre's own admission, is a work based on the philosophy of existentialism. The book centers around a character called Antoine Roquentin, a troubled writer and lonely man residing in the French town of Bouville. It falls in the nouveau roman(new novel) category or fictionalized fiction wherein the protagonist is trying to write a great work of literature and his struggle of writing this book in turn becomes the novel.
Roquentin is a lonely man. His life is very much routined. There are no adventures as such. He is trying to write a book on the life of Marquis de Robellon, a 18th century diplomat. He goes for walks in parks, sits for hours in libraries and takes his meals at Cafe Maleby. At the library, he meets a man, whom he calls Autodidact.Autodidact is a humanist whose sole aim seems to be reading all the books in the library; his reading goes on alphabetically according to the name of authors. Roquentin has some intermittent conversations with the Autodidact. In these conversations, Roquentin mentions how he has travelled the whole world from Asia to the Africas but there is no evidence of this and all this might be happening due to his mental state.
But Roquentin can't write the book with the pace as he would have liked to. Often, in cafes or in the street he is struck by an acute ailment which he calls nausea. This ailment isn't physical, there is something philosophical behind this. Roquentin is in a fight with the whole city. He is irritated by the bourgeois of the city; their superfluous nature. When, on a Sunday, he walks on the streets, he is struck by the crowd of people, their actions and habits that don't ever change. In these periods of nausea, he asks why does he exist? What is existence? He can't help it when every object around him-tree, chair, bird- starts peeling off the layer and shows what's beneath it. He is driven to think that there is no reason for existence at all. He has attained freedom and might as well end his life and hence the existence. He sees the trees as carrying off their existence as a sign of their weakness, the roots and branches do what they have to do out of their functionality. He says that the trees go on with their existence because they can't end it. He finds everything superfluous and says that the seat on which he is sitting might as well be a dead donkey. He sees people in the cafe and thinks that one of them belongs to the same group as himself. Often he writes about his ex girlfriend Amy , who suddenly sends him a letter to meet her after five years. During their conversation he discovers that he and she think very much alike. Hence, chances are that both the Autodidact and Amy are echoes of his own personality. Roquentin abandons the idea of writing his book and says" He can't write about the existence of past when his own existence is superfluous".
Sartre uses the idea of contingency or randaomness through the fictional character. Roquentin, when under one of the attacks of nausea, says that under everything that has got a name or which exists, there is a superfluidity. We call the 'tree' a 'tree' because we can't call it a cat or dog. There is a randomness in his own life " I am going out because there is no reason of my not going out ". It ridicules him to see everything in this world carrying its miserable existence, their name; while he can see the absurdity of all this. When he abandons writing his book, he feels there is no reason for him to carry on with his life. He feels a freedom like he had never known before. He sees this randomness as the absence of making choice. He has relapsed into a nothingness. He has found the absurdity of his life.
Sartre ends the novel, when Roquentin decides to leave for Paris but misses his train when he passes out in a hotel of Bouville listening to jazz. He thinks that he has to write a great book, something which goes beyond the mundane existence.
Nausea isn't just a book on existence. It's a book which rekindled the flame of philosophical debates that had been dormant for years now.
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