What does it mean to feel alone? Sartre’s Nausea
Premise Student Questions
Premise students bring thought-provoking and discussion-worthy questions to each class session. Here’s what students were curious about after reading Sartre’s Nausea:
Page 231--So I write whatever comes into my mind. How can someone write what comes to mind and still create a narrative?
I am always very interested in form and structure, would love to hear people expand on Ronmel’s observations
What excerpts feel like the thesis of the book?
How does Sartre portray sex and love and romance in the novel? Negatively or positively, and is he "right" about them?
Is aloneness increased or mitigated by the author constantly considering how other don’t see or understand the way he does?
What do we make of the connection at the end between beauty and aloneness or connection with others, even if the others are no longer living?
Is this a novel about depression / melancholia? Reading it after The Bell Jar has me wondering….
Adventure is defined as: "an event out of the ordinary without necessarily being extraordinary." (by the Self Taught Man). Sartre later dissects this to be a relationship with time, where one moment leads to the next and he seems to attribute adventure to a glitch in that phenomenon. Is this dissection fair and is it an example of a thought pattern, or habit, that causes loneliness? I am thinking that part of the main character's angst is that he tends to rip apart experience into its constituent parts, and it leaves experience less meaningful.
P. 151 I want to better understand the meeting between the former lovers in which he says, “she was as solitary as I.”
The book seems perennially in search for a structure. And yet, the book seems to me to be free of an outright sense of chaos. What do we make of this odd paradox? Of this paradoxical way of giving an understanding of life structure?
How are the Self-Taught Man's beliefs different from Antoine's? Are they a worthwhile alternative? Why or why not?
If Antoine doesn't believe in the existence of memory or personality, how does he tend to judge people? Is he any good at it?
“I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it.”- Nausea
