Nausea Chapter 20: Friday Summary & Analysis

A thick fog blankets the city. Roquentin makes his way to Café Mably. An old woman enters the café looking for Monsieur Fasquelle, but the waiter tells her that he is still upstairs. Before she leaves, the old woman wonders aloud if Fasquelle is dead. Roquentin begins to imagine walking up the stairs and finding Fasquelle’s dead body. When he finally stands, the waiter sees him, and Roquentin quickly tells him that he heard a choking noise from upstairs. He tries to convince the waiter to check on Fasquelle himself. The waiter is concerned, but he doesn’t go upstairs, and Roquentin leaves.

The fog over Bouville corresponds to Roquentin’s mental state, which is particularly scrambled and hazy in this entry. Perhaps as a result, Roquentin seems to be particularly suggestible as he starts to dwell on the possibility of Monsieur Fasquelle’s death. His imagination starts to take the place of his observations of reality, and he becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator.

Active Themes

Taking to the streets again, Roquentin now believes Fasquelle dead, and his thoughts turn to images of blood. At the library, Roquentin encounters the Self-Taught Man, who asks him to lunch. Although he doesn’t want to, Roquentin accepts. As he works, he notices that the reading room guard, a Corsican man, seems as though he wants to tell him something, but he never does. Roquentin keeps thinking of Fasquelle, and the room around him feels less and less real. Finally, Roquentin rushes back to Café Mably, but no one is there when he arrives. He panics and runs through the streets, staring at his surroundings as if to stop them from changing shape.

The barrier between possibility and reality seems completely obliterated in Roquentin’s mind now. As the fog persists, Roquentin’s grasp on existence itself grows less and less steady. Roquentin’s acceptance of the Self-Taught Man’s invitation, much like his acceptance of Anny’s commands via letter, again reflects his passive approach to his own life. The Corsican guard’s behavior foreshadows the reveal of the Self-Taught Man’s predilections at the end of Roquentin’s diary for a second time.

Active Themes

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Roquentin starts back toward the library, passing a man in a cape that he has seen twice earlier today. As Roquentin passes, the man in the cape starts smiling, and Roquentin stops to observe. The man stands up and starts to walk toward a little girl, who stares back at him without surprise as he starts to take hold of his cloak. Suddenly, though, the man sees Roquentin, and the girl runs away. Roquentin only warns the man that “a great menace weighs over the city” and leaves. Back at the reading room, the Corsican guard ushers reluctant patrons out of the library at closing time. Roquentin is loath to go outside, but when he does, he finds that it’s raining and the fog is gone.

The man in the cape seems like just another relatively insignificant part of Roquentin’s surroundings, until he isn’t. In reality, Bouville (and by extension, the world) is full of people who are troubled or unstable, like both Roquentin and the man in the cape. Roquentin notes pedophilia and sexual violence as if part of the landscape of Bouville several times, and this is one of those instances: the man in the cape intends to flash the little girl. The little girl’s initially challenging gaze might be read in two different ways: first, it might suggest that she’s so young and innocent that she has no idea what the man intends to do. It could also suggest (in Roquentin’s subjective understanding) she’s a tiny bit complicit in his bad behavior. Given the sympathy toward sex offenders that Roquentin demonstrates throughout parts of the remainder of the novel, both interpretations seem possible. The menace that Roquentin refers to is similarly ambiguous, but it might well refer to the fog that still lingers over the city. Speaking in such a veiled way, Roquentin seems just as crazy as the flasher, suggesting their shared nonconformity.

Active Themes

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Nausea: Chapter 20: Friday Summary & Analysis