A roquentin, they tell us, has as its primary meaning in the Larousse Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century: “A name formerly given to songs composed of fragments of other songs and linked together as in a cento, so as to produce bizarre effects by changes in rhythm and abrupt breaks in the succession of thoughts.” They note that Nausea continually refers to other ways of speaking, even as it rejects them, and that Antoine Roquentin himself appears to be a man who listens to and copies others’ discourse in order to reconstitute it, half seriously, half comically, in his diary.
