Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre is one of the most prominent names in existentialist philosophy. I have been reading Dostoyevsky for some time now, so the philosophy itself is not alien to me. But outside of the Russian, seldom have I ventured to other authors of the pedigree. A book by Camus (The Outsider), Kafka (The Metamorphosis), Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) are the few ventures. I did read Nietzsche but the existentialism in his work was shrouded in layers of hubris. In a dearth of better options and a search for something different, I went for "Nausea".

Sartre described existentialism as : the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism; which is what he has attempted to do in this book. This book follows the thoughts and actions of a young man in a city. He is facing his existentialist crisis; his 'Nausea'. Through the protagonist, Roquentin, Sartre debates on the act of existing and the necessity of it. He calls the world and its population superfluous and absurd. To quote my favourite line from the book :

Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

This line is representative of the philosophy expounded in the book. Sartre ridicules all 'bourgeois' sentiments and squashes them into a state of absurd. Art, travel, love, learning; all hold no meaning in a world that is random and beyond one's control. Even death would be nothing more than another random event.

Antoine Roquentin is a young man living in Bouville - a fictitious character in a fictitious setting. He has travelled far and wide and has settled down to write a book on a historical figure of the eighteenth century. As he struggles through his research and his life, he records his thoughts in a diary which is presented to us readers. His life is quite ordinary; he spends time in the library for research, goes to cafes for food, is physically intimate with the pattronne of the cafe, goes for walks. But his thoughts are anything but ordinary. He is constantly struggling with a 'nausea' that attacks him from time to time. In this nauseous state he finds himself questioning the existence of himself and everything around him. He has a friend of sorts, who he has nicknamed the Autodidact, who believes in humanity and then there is Anna, his old love and his only hope of salvation.

Sartre more than impressed; enough for me to want to read his more acclaimed work "Being and Nothingness". He excels in writing about abstracts. The long rants about meaningless and unreal things adorned his book immensely. His settings were not very thorough though. There was something amiss in every scene he created. Nevertheless, "Being and Nothingness" enters my list somewhere in the upper echelons. Would definitely want to read more of this one.