Nausea (New Directions Paperbook) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This book made a deep impression on me when I first read it in high school. Recommend to me by a friend, I found myself experiencing the nausea Sartre's main character experiences. I think this is why some people talk about this book being boring or mindless. It is in a sense. Sartre will take you there. But I couldn't put this book down. This was a familiar feeling to me and I wanted to know what was going to happen to this man. The ending of the book is the only slight flaw. Not that you don't pick out the resolution but because it is a little light and Sartre's mechanism for the main character's resolution is a little cheesy. At any rate it still works and as a result the thoughts are in my mind often.

la nausea es la historia de la nada, del nihilismo que no nos permite creer en nada y nos mortifica cuando estamos vacios.el protagonista es atacado por su preocupacion constante de no ser mas que una pieza en un mundo que no tiene sentido. esto es mas que buena literatura. es filosofia de altura...

This book is Sartre's attempt to show that existence is absolutely disgusting, pointess, useless and so on. And it is also an absolute fake because the author behaves as though he believed nothing of which he was writing. Sartre uses his protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, to sequentially explore a variety of options that are traditionally have been thought to give meaning to life, and he in turn, shows how shallow each and every one of them are. Love, work, sex, etc. But this sort of novel is rather troublesome -- one sort of knows that one is being hoodwinked the whole time, that the author has an ax to grind and that the whole story was being constructed in order to prove his point with literature. But we all know that literature can be used to lend credence to one's own point of view (whether correct or not) and does not necessarily tell one the way that things really are. In that sense, this is an ideal sense of propaganda. If Sartre really believed what he was writing, he would have committed suicide rather than bothering to wrote a book. I mean, once the author comes to the point where he discovers that life is pointless, it seems rather absurd to say "and to continue . . .". But this is not the case. There were few philosophers more vigorous and productive than Sartre, so his very life serves as an example of how his nihilism was contradictory. He repeatedly fails to make use of Roquentin's experiences of "adventure" or even anger. In other words, there are solutions that are inherent in the situation, which Sartre repeatedly fails to make use of. He tries to demonstrate the "nothingness" of human consciousness byt showing how vacant people are when there is no other humans to serve as a stimulus -- but all the time, the very act of writing the book gives lie to what he was attempting to show! He shows quote clearly that his consciousness os far from being as vacuous as he tries to show in his novel. Also, if he had not erroneously reject Husserl's idea of the transcendence of the ego, he would have at least had a more productive starting point from which to build upon. Also, any form of meaning scheme's other than the "here and now" are rejected out of hand. Any sort of Gestalt ideas are rejected without so much as an attempt to reason why they might be false. Also, the whole book seemed like just so much whining and self-pitying tripe. Heidegger's notions such as "authentic existence" are never made the slightest use of, although they provide more in the way of solution that Sartre ever would (his communism seems a poor solution to any sort of philosophical problems that he raised). The book was a good attmept to justify a flawed philosophy, and the reading style is tedious at best. Although barely a hundred pages long, it seems like three hundred because all seems so dead in the book. Also, for those genuinely interested in psychology, do recall that Sartre's experiment in taking mescalin was done shortly before he wrote this book, and with Sartre's overall personality type, the effects of the drug on him may have well resulted in the sort ot meaning starvation and depression that Sartre seemd to have been suffereing from at the time he wrote this book. Such reactions to the drug were not that uncommon and may provide clues for future philsophers.