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Chapter 10: 3.00 p.m.
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Nausea, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Existence vs. Essence
Time
Love and Sexuality
Art and Legacy
Summary
Analysis
Roquentin stands at the reading-room windows and watches the frightened-looking old woman from the square walk by again. As he watches her, time seems to slow, and moments blend together. Roquentin becomes lost in memories of his travels. As he thinks of the past, he realizes that he can’t separate memory and imagination anymore. In some places, his memories have also disappeared or become confusing to him. Roquentin picks up a picture of a woman and stares at her without recognition before turning it over and seeing that it’s labelled “Anny.”
The old woman passing the statue of Impétraz prompts Roquentin to reflect on the nature of time itself. As he watches her, he stops thinking of time in terms of objective measures and instead experiences it in subjective moments. It seems likely that it’s the woman’s visible old age that inspires his thoughts. Since she’s as repulsed by the statue as he is, he starts to compare himself to her, and he perhaps imagines himself growing old, too. But Roquentin’s mind is so confused and awash in apathy that he can’t even sort out his own memories, rendering the passage of time almost meaningless.
Themes
The Self-Taught Man asks Roquentin to show him pictures from his travels, calling Roquentin lucky for the opportunity he’s had to learn about the world firsthand. As Roquentin flips through photographs, the Self-Taught Man reacts excitedly, trying to connect each picture to facts he’s learned through his reading. The Self-Taught Man admits that he longs to travel and have adventures. When he asks Roquentin if he has had any adventures himself, Roquentin’s first impulse is to say yes—but he suddenly feels as though he’s never had an adventure at all. “Things have happened to me,” Roquentin muses, “[…] But no adventures.” He begins to think he never will have an adventure, and he wonders why.
The contrast between Roquentin’s and the Self-Taught Man’s methods of education is on display in this interaction. Even when perusing Roquentin’s photographs of his travels, the Self-Taught Man’s urge is to find references for Roquentin’s lived experiences in his own theoretical reading. Again, Roquentin appears very passive here, considering even his wide-ranging travels things that simply happened to him, as if he were never in control of them.
Themes
