SOURCE: “Sartre's Nature: Animal Images in La Nausée,” in Symposium, Vol. 31, Summer, 1977, pp. 107-25.

In the following essay, Brosman argues that the animals in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausée are intended to represent the worst in human nature.

Although a number of scholars have noted the presence in Jean-Paul Sartre's fiction of images of insects and crabs, the role of numerous other animal images in La Nausée and their psychological and philosophical suggestiveness have not been fully explored.¹ In the present essay I shall be concerned to study these in relation to its thematics and to draw some conclusions concerning Sartre's early view of nature. While not proposing a new reading of the novel, I believe this study can show additional aspects of its thematic construction and imaginative fabric.

This examination might be organized according to types of figures of speech, or according to the...