ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the relationship between the lives people live and the narratives they come to tell about them. It focuses on a work of fiction, namely Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. It mainly deals with the narrator of this story. The narrator, Antoine Roquentin, seems to know all too well many of the problems. The novel takes the form of a kind of metaphysical journal in which Roquentin aims to record in piecemeal fashion the goings-on of his life. To live without narrative, it would appear, is to live in an essentially meaningless perpetual present, devoid of form and coherence; it is to experience the world as disconnected and fragmented, as an endless series of things that happen. This, Roquentin had suggested, was the reality of our existence; anything else was to be understood as simply the product of our imagination.
