How Sartre, Philosopher, Misreads Sartre, Novelist: Nausea and the Adventures of the Narrative Self

Abstract

Sartre’s novel Nausea is frequently used as a venue for disputing the relevance of narrative to understanding life. Both MacIntyre (a proponent of narrative understanding) and Strawson (a critic of it) cite Roquentin’s claim that one must “live or tell” and suggest that the novel presents lived experience and storytelling as mutually exclusive. I contextualize Roquentin’s claim within the larger dramatic arc of the story and argue that the novel does not ultimately oppose narrative understanding, but instead invites a reframing of the questions of narrativity. The narrative structure of our lives is not simply given, but posited by us as part of the structure of purposeful activity. Along the way I compare Roquentin’s notion of “adventures” to Simmel’s of the same name and defend the philosophical usefulness of novels more generally.