ABSTRACT
For a decade or two in post-war Europe, Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of consciousness caught the public imagination like no other before or since. Sartre took his primary influence from the phenomenology of Husserl and fashioned from it and other philosophical and literary inspirations the French existentialist model, which swept across Western culture. Sartre's vision was of a self-created self, absolutely free and absolutely responsible for its own choices, grappling with a Godless, purposeless world and the hostile gaze of the Other. In Sartre's Nausea, the focus is on the individual, and the author's attention is directed towards the workings of consciousness itself, its relationship with the raw, and physical reality it confronts through the senses. The author's attention is also directed towards the other minds it encounters, and with the self it conjures intermittently into existence from present feelings and the records of memory.
