Between Music and Narrative: The Lived-Experience of Time in Sartre’s Nausea

Cameron Bassiri, American University, Washington, D.C.

In the following presentation, I will provide an account of the theme of time as it is described in Sartre’s Nausea. Through an engagement with the diary form of the text and the experiences of Antoine Roquentin, I will explain the different concepts of time that Sartre develops. Much research has been given to the temporal order and necessity of the ragtime Some of These Days and how it contrasts with the contingency of existence. However, sufficient attention has not been devoted to the theme of time as it is lived by the main character after his realization of such contingency. I would like to provide just such an account, with particular attention devoted to the manner in which objects lose both their everyday significance and their temporal character. In so doing, I will show how the experience of nausea involves the disorientation of the time of the previously well-ordered and coherent everyday experience. Moreover, I will explain how the disorder of the dates of the diary entries and the chronological inaccuracies in the text contribute to the disorientation in the experience of reading the text.