Crabs Symbol Analysis

In Roquentin’s most paranoid fantasies, crabs represent Roquentin himself: scuttling and unnatural, on the edge of total madness. Crabs first appear in Roquentin’s narrative when he remembers a man he encountered during his childhood. The man used to sit in the Luxembourg gardens and stare at his own foot for long periods of time, as if he were afraid of it. Once, when Roquentin and his friends went to the garden to play, the man smiled at one of Roquentin’s friends and stretched out his arms as if to embrace him. The children were terrified, and Roquentin remembers their fear as stemming from their certainty that the man was “shaping thoughts of crab or lobster in his head.” The thought that the man could be having visions of things so divorced from the real world of the garden was frightening to the children.

As a Nausea-stricken adult, Roquentin remembers this incident and wonders whether he’s heading down the same path as the man in the Luxembourg gardens. Throughout much of the novel, Roquentin fears that he is going insane, and that like the man in the garden, he will become completely isolated and rejected by society. The image of the crab returns when Roquentin gives up on writing his historical study of the Marquis de Rollebon. Crushed by his perception of existence, Roquentin looks down at his hand and sees a crab in its place—just as the man in the garden looked at his foot and thought of crabs and lobsters. The incident symbolizes Roquentin’s further detachment from reality and from human society. Things take a decided turn for the worse when Roquentin suffers a minor mental breakdown at the end of his meal with the Self-Taught Man. Imagining his entire self as the crab crawling backward in escape, Roquentin throws down his knife and runs out of the restaurant while everyone stares at him. By this point in the novel, Roquentin’s internal alienation from the rest of humanity has surpassed that of the man in the garden, and he feels utterly insane and unnatural, and the crab symbolism reinforces this point.