To evade the nausea, Antoine immerses himself in the study of those that have existed in the past, and he is currently in the city of Bouville (possibly a renamed Boulogne), France, researching the history of the Marquis de Rollebon, a courtier of Marie Antoinette and a most adventurous scoundrel. The ordinariness of Antoine's career emphasizes the absurdity of existence in a world designed for those who are content to live the unexamined life. At the local library, he makes the acquaintance of a Self-Taught Man (the only name by which he is known) who endeavors to educate himself by reading every book available to him, in alphabetical order. The Self-Taught Man, an ex-soldier who had spent some time as a prisoner of war, is the essence of bourgeois humanism and optimism; he mistakes Antoine's inquiries into existence for a search for the meaning of life. Another perspective on existence is given by Antoine's snide ex-girlfriend Anny, whose childhood experiences have led her to the conclusion that death, or dying, is a "privileged situation" because of the importance it is attributed not only in actuality but as the subject in so many works of art, where it is portrayed as the transcendence of existence.
Written in the style of a diary, "Nausea" reads like a memoir containing many personalized aphorisms about existence and its opposite, nothingness, which ironically also must exist; but these are too subjective to be universally useful. Rather, the novel's biggest triumph is the convincing expressiveness of Sartre's protagonist, who manages to convey in lucid language the ideas behind coming to terms with one's own existence. Antoine may be morose and introverted, but he is an excellent analyst of nature and has intellectual energy to spare.
How man reacts when confronted with such absolute inescapable realities. Can the instinct of self-preservation withstand such vicious assault which threatenes to destroy the beautiful heartfelt love for the self? It can, in theory: since being conditiones thinking and not the viceversa. However, in practice, it does BADLY, since the very basis upon which automatisms are built gets downgraded towards a pitiful state, when you KNOW you are nothing more than disposable meat mass...