Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Camus reviewed Nausea when it appeared and, while dazzled by the book, disliked its philosophy. He did not make explicit his objection, but one can surmise that he disliked Sartre’s fatalism. For Camus, the realization that life is absurd is the beginning of a stoic battle against that absurdity. Camus concluded, in The Myth of Sisyphus, that it was not acceptable for the absurd person to commit suicide, but that to live, and live rebelliously, “with my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” was the best way of both acknowledging and rejecting death. Sartre by contrast, at least in this novel, has got beyond — or never reaches — such a state of flushed challenge. In the park, Roquentin thinks about killing himself, but comes to the perfectly logical conclusion that given life’s randomness, suicide too would be random, and thus meaningless: “But my death itself would have been superfluous.” In other words. Roquentin is already dead, so why bother killing himself? Certainly, this would have seemed intensely fatalistic to Camus.