Nausea

Antoine Roquentin, a thirty-five-year-old bachelor lives alone in Bouville, an imaginary town that recalls Havre. He is working on a book about the life of the late Marquis of Rollebon, an aristocrat of the late eighteenth century, and living off his income, after leaving a job in Indochina, the fatigue of travel and what he believes to be the adventure. This awareness marks one of Sartre's first important thoughts in the book. Roquentin is no longer compatible with the bourgeoisie or Mr. Bouville Rollebon who quickly seems boring and uninteresting, since history is about what has existed, and never an existing one can justify the existence of another Existing. It was then, in one of the most philosophical passages of the book, that he relates how dizzying he is conscious.

A key point in the book comes when it describes the -Self-Made Man- in this translation who is called l'Autodidacte in the French when he is caught fondeling a little boy under the library desk. The library staff has been suspecting this and has been watching him and when they finally catch him in the act, he is beaten and expelled from the library.

Another key point revealed near the end is why the protagonist is able to write a biography of Marquis de Rollebon, an obscure politician, whose nephew was assassinated by the Czar's police, his papers confiscated. The protagonist here explaines he has stolen the papers from the state library to be used in writing this book. Now, he abandones this project and has to decide what to do with the stolen papers. Naturally, he should return them to the library but the answer to this question is not revealed.