Nausea

“This is what I have to avoid, I must not put in strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you’re always looking for something.”

Antoine’s opening statement in his own diary casts his reliability as a narrator into question. What events are exaggerated, and what truths are drawn after the fact? In a novel about the nausea induced by the immediate now of existence, a diary written after the fact of experiencing a moment is suspect in its ability to convey the experience accurately.

“If I am not mistaken, if all the signs which have been amassed are precursors of a new overthrow in my life, well then I am terrified. It isn’t that my life is rich, or weighty or precious. But I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me—and drag me—where? Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished? Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken, deceived, in the midst of new ruins? I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.”

Antoine fears the freedom he has to give up his purpose and search for a new purpose at any moment. Antoine’s nausea eventually drives him to do just this. Antoine suggests that “the Nausea” is something that “possesses” and “drags” him, raising the question of whether or not the Antoine at the start of the novel is really the same person as the Antoine at the end of the novel.

“Perhaps it is impossible to understand one’s own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. […] Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say—yes you might say, nature without humanity.”

Antoine repeatedly suggests that it is his complete disconnect from others that brings on his existential revelations (and dread). Without others, he is free from the façade of essence (“humanity”) and can see existence underneath (“nature”).