The Story Archive

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre · 1938 CE · Novel · French · Contemporary

A historian settles in a drab Norman port to finish a life of an eighteenth-century adventurer and starts a diary because things have begun behaving strangely in his hands: a pebble on the beach, a door handle, a glass of beer. He works in the library beside a man reading his way through it alphabetically, sees an old lover passing through, and finds the town's respectable dead staring out of the museum wall. A whole philosophy in a queasy notebook.

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Lineage

Attributes

Genre
PsychologicalSatire
Theme
Existential AbsurdityIsolation & AlienationIdentity & SelfMemory & Time
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Anti-HeroEverymanWanderer
Plot structure
ConfessionMeditationOpen Ending
Symbol / motif
The StoneThe Book / ManuscriptThe Portrait
Conflict
vs Selfvs Society
Mode / tone
AbsurdistModernistIronic
Culture / tradition
French

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