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Chapter 8: 5.30
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Nausea, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Existence vs. Essence
Time
Love and Sexuality
Art and Legacy
Summary
Analysis
Roquentin works on his research at the reading room and then takes a break in front of the library to smoke his pipe. As he smokes, Roquentin watches people pass by a bronze statue of Gustave Impétraz. He muses that the passersby don’t engage with the statue on a deep level—they just glance at it and assume that someone as important looking as Impétraz must have shared their own views. One old woman, however, pauses to look fearfully at the statue before she goes on her way. When Roquentin himself looks at the statue, he suspects that Impétraz wants to drive him away. Encountering the Self-Taught Man, Roquentin exchanges a few awkward words with him before the two return to the library together.
Roquentin’s description of the public’s engagement with the statue of Impétraz encapsulates one of Sartre’s arguments about existence and essence. The people passing by the statue don’t even look at the statue itself. Instead, they only think of their own interpretation of the statue’s significance, which they’re naturally inclined to make flattering to themselves. In this way, people become increasingly removed from the existence, or bare truth, of things. Roquentin’s own reaction to the statue follows the earlier patterns of his encounters with the stone and the piece of paper: he feels repulsed by it because it confronts him with the fact of its existence.
Themes
