Nausea

这是一篇关于《Nausea》这本书的观后感essay

Nausea is the feeling that you have when you want to vomit. This is the literal meaning of nausea, which can be found in the dictionary. In the novel, Nausea, we can also find this kind of feeling companying the whole life of Roquentin, after his negation of all the things.From the perspective of Roquentin, at first, we can say, Nausea is a kind of sickness, reflecting Roquentin’s self-consciousness. As we could figure out, Roquentin is a neurotic and lonely man with strong self-consciousness. So it is not difficult that this kind of man could easily get ‘sick’, and he gets a feeling that all the things around him cause nausea. He finds out nausea is the feeling caused by his realization of the existence of himself. On the other hand, nausea is Roquentin’s feeling of the meaningless life. Roquentin is a sensitive middle-aged intellectual, uneasy about his life, which threatens and devours him, and overwhelms his minds. It is this kind of life that causes the feeling of nausea, which separates him from the real life. As he says, he belongs to another species. The experience that he is always immersed in the work, contributing to the honor of Marquis de Rollebon, has deprived him from the life he used to be, and as a result causing the feeling of nausea. Moreover, nausea is the connection between him and the world. Starting from the moment when Roquentin feels lost towards his life, the moment when he gets rid of reproducing history for Marquis de Rollebon and the moment when he realizes the disillusion of his dreaming of love story, he thinks it’s as if Rollebon has replaced his life so he feels meaninglessness of himself. From that moment on, he loses contact with all the things, and all he leaves is a kind of feeling, nausea--the only way for him to connect the world.

From the perspective of philosophy, for one part, nausea is the cognition of existence. In Roquentin’s eyes, all the things around him suddenly become strange and weird, and he doesn’t understand why they should be there, and he also can’t figure out where the sense of existence stands. Then he focuses on the thinking of himself but he still don’t know what he is doing right there and why he should exist, and finally gets a feeling of nausea. When he thinks about the existence of all the things, he gets sense of nausea. Nausea is a kind of reaction or cognition towards the thinking of existence. For another, nausea is a kind of freedom. Roquentin thinks man is just a soft and odd-looking body, and it is nonsense of the existence of humans. When he realizes this, he has a feeling of nausea, but because of the incomplete reality, he gets rid of the real world. As I say, it is a sense of freedom, imagined by Roquentin.