Anton Roquentin is such an individual who surveys, analyzes and
records in a detached, phenomenological manner the actions, events
and surroundings of his world, as if they were happening to him and
not the result of his own actions. His medium is the diary – the vehicle of
a solitary man. He remarks a certain sickness – perhaps a “mental”
illness – that has plagued him throughout his travels before reaching
Bouville. “I think I am cured,” he records hopefully in the undated first
sheet of the papers that constitute the published work. “I’m cured. I’ll
give up writing my daily impressions” (N 9 ). Apparently keeping such a
diary was either a way of preserving the memory of experiences subse-
quently to be related to an analyst or a friend or, more likely, a form of
self-medication for the malady that afflicts him. But that hope of a cure
was unfounded, as his first dated entry attests: “Something has
happened to me, I can’t doubt it any more. It came as an illness does,
not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cun-
ningly, little by little” (Nausea 11 ).
Ontological sickness and its aesthetic cure
Early in the book, the order of necessity and contingency experienced by
the child Sartre is reversed. The protagonist realizes the unpredictability
work of Karl Jaspers for whom Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were major influences, and whom
Sartre named on his application for the Berlin fellowship as one of the figures he wished to
study, may have brought him into contact with Kierkegaardian thought as well. Recall that
he and Nizan helped with the French translation of Jaspers’sAllgemeine Psychopathologie
[Berlin: Springer, 1923 ] that contains twelve references to Kierkegaard, including several
quotations. The same, of course, should be said of Heidegger’s use of “Angst,” a Kierke-
gaardian hallmark with which Sartre was familiar. In the absence of direct references, of
course, claims of Sartre’s familiarity with Kierkegaard’s thought prior to the composition of
Nausearemain hypothetical. In theWar Diaries, however, he relates Nausea and Anguish:
“The existential grasping of our facticity is Nausea, and the existential apprehension of our
freedom is Anguish” (WD-E 133 ). And inNauseaitself the atmosphere ofl’ennui(boredom)
is pervasive. These “probabilities” weaken in the face of Sartre’s direct denial. Asked in an
interview for the Schilpp volume when he discovered Kierkegaard, he responded: “Around
1939 – 1940. Before then I knew he existed, but he was only a name. Because of the doublea,
I think...That kept me from reading him” (Schilpp 12 ). Of course, one should recall
Sartre’s similar categorical denial of any dialectic inBNor earlier, contrary to the claims of
essays in that same volume by Robert D. Cumming and Klaus Hartmann (see Schilpp 18 f.).
InWar Diarieshe recounts having received a copy ofThe Concept of Dread(Angst) from
Beauvoir at his request (WD-E 139 ) and in a letter to her he remarks: “I also found a theory
of nothingness while reading Kierkegaard” (Dec. 21 , 1939 ;Witness to My Life, 420 ).142 The necessity of contingency:Nausea