![]() La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre | |
Author | Jean-Paul Sartre |
---|---|
Original title | La Nausée |
Translator | Lloyd Alexander; Robert Baldick |
Language | French |
Genre | Philosophical novel |
Published |
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Publication place | France |
Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
Pages | 253 (Penguin Books edition) |
ISBN | 0-8112-0188-0 (US ed.) |
OCLC | 8028693 |
Nausea (French: La Nausée) is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre's first novel.[1][2]
The novel takes place in 'Bouville' (homophone of Boue-ville, literally, 'Mud town') a town similar to Le Havre.[3] It comprises the thoughts and subjective experiences—in a personal diary format—of Antoine Roquentin, a melancholic and socially isolated intellectual who is residing in Bouville ostensibly for the purpose of completing a biography on a historical figure. Roquentin's growing alienation and disillusionment coincide with an increasingly intense experience of revulsion, which he calls "the nausea", in which the people and things around him seem to lose all their familiar and recognizable qualities. Sartre's original title for the novel before publication was Melancholia.
The novel has been translated into English by Lloyd Alexander as The Diary of Antoine Roquentin[3] and by Robert Baldick as Nausea.[4]
I would like them to remember Nausea, one or two plays, No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on Genet, Saint Genet.... If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more.