[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.

[3][6] The critic William V. Spanos has used Sartre's novel as an example of "negative capability", a presentation of the uncertainty and dread of human existence so strong that the imagination cannot comprehend it.

"[8] Although novelists like Sartre claim to be in rebellion against the 19th Century French novel, "they in fact owe a great deal both to its promotion of the lowly and to its ambiguous or 'poetic' aspects.

[11] Hayden Carruth wonders if there are unrecognized layers of irony and humor beneath the seriousness of Nausea: "Sartre, for all his anguished disgust, can play the clown as well, and has done so often enough: a sort of fool at the metaphysical court.

"[3] Like many modernist authors, Sartre, when young, loved popular novels in preference to the classics and claimed in his autobiography that it was from them, rather than from the balanced phrases of Chateaubriand, that he had his "first encounters with beauty".

He wanted his novelistic techniques to be compatible with his theories on the existential freedom of the individual as well as his phenomenological analyses of the unstable, shifting structures of consciousness.

[15] Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, lacking human contact, being trapped in fantasies about the 18th-century secret agent he is writing a book about, he establishes Sartre's oeuvre as a follow-up to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, or Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in search of a precise description of schizophrenia.

[16] Hayden Carruth wrote of the way that "Roquentin has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters ...

It is scarcely possible to read seriously in contemporary literature, philosophy, or psychology without encountering references to Roquentin's confrontation with the chestnut tree, for example, which is one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish.

He likewise felt that Sartre had tipped the balance too far in depicting the repugnant features of mankind "instead of placing the reasons for his despair, at least to a certain degree, if not completely, on the elements of human greatness."

"[23]As the project developed, Sartre intended to follow Husserl's phenomenological maxim, "to the things themselves," and lead his audience as directly as possible to the experience of reality itself, which required the art of literature rather than the abstract prose of academic philosophy.

The element of masculine protest, to use Adler's term, is strong throughout Sartre's writings ... the disgust ... of Roquentin, in Nausea, at the bloated roots of the chestnut tree ...".

In his "Introduction" to the American edition of Nausea,[3] the poet and critic Hayden Carruth feels that, even outside those modern writers who are explicitly philosophers in the existentialist tradition, a similar vein of thought is implicit but prominent in a main line through Franz Kafka, Miguel de Unamuno, D. H. Lawrence, André Malraux, and William Faulkner.

Sartre declared,[27] in a lecture given in Paris on 29 October 1945 (later published under the title L'existentialisme est un humanisme):What is meant ... by saying that existence precedes essence?

David Drake mentions[28] that, in Nausea, Sartre gives several kinds of examples of people whose behavior shows bad faith, who are inauthentic: members of the bourgeoisie who believe their social standing or social skills give them a "right" to exist, or others who embrace the banality of life and attempt to flee from freedom by repeating empty gestures, others who live by perpetuating past versions of themselves as they were or who live for the expectations of others, or those who claim to have found meaning in politics, morality, or ideology.

As a practical matter, he could solve his problem by getting a job; but, as a device for developing the novel's theme, his aloneness is a way of making him (and the reader) recognize that there is nothing inherent in the objective nature of the world that would give any necessary meaning to whatever actions he chose, and therefore nothing to restrict his freedom.

"[H]is perception of the world around him becomes unstable as objects are disengaged from their usual frames of reference," and he is forced[29] to recognize that freedom is inescapable and that therefore creating a meaning for his life is his own responsibility.

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.During the Second World War, the experience of Sartre and others in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France emphasized political activism as a form of personal commitment.

This political dimension was developed in Sartre's later trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949), which concern[31] a vicious circle of failure on the part of a thinking individual to progress effectively from thought to action.

The subjectivity that is the starting point of existentialism seemed to the Marxists to be foreign to the objective character of economic conditions and to the goal of uniting the working classes in order to overthrow the bourgeoise capitalists.

Roy Elveton reports:[34] In January, 1939, one year after the death of Edmund Husserl, Sartre published a short essay entitled 'Husserl's Central Idea.'

'Following Husserl,[33] Sartre views absurdity as a quality of all existing objects (and of the material world collectively), independent of any stance humans might take with respect to them.

Victoria Best writes:[15] Language proves to be a fragile barrier between Roquentin and the external world, failing to refer to objects and thus place them in a scheme of meaning.

Once language collapses it becomes evident that words also give a measure of control and superiority to the speaker by keeping the world at bay; when they fail in this function, Roquentin is instantly vulnerable, unprotected.

Nausea was[37] a prelude to Sartre's sustained attempt to follow Heidegger's Sein und Zeit by analyzing human experience as various ontological modes, or ways of being in the world.

This seemingly technical change fit[39] with Sartre's native predisposition to think of subjectivity as central: a conscious person is always immersed in a world where his or her task is to make himself concrete.

On the other hand, analytical philosophers and logical positivists were "outraged by Existentialism's willingness to abandon rational categories and rely on nonmental processes of consciousness."

[20] Upon the confession of the Self-Taught Man as to being a member of the S.F.I.O., a French Socialist party, Roquentin quickly engages him in a Socratic dialogue to expose his inconsistencies as a humanist.

Sartre deleted the populist material, which was not natural to him, with few complaints, because he wanted to be published by the prestigious N.R.F., which had a strong, if vague, house style.