'It is': Reflections on the role of music in Sartre's La 'Nausee'

Abstract

Music plays an important role in Jean-Paul Sartre's existential archetype, La Nausée (1938). In the novel the central character, Antoine Roquentin, attempts to overcome the debilitating tawdriness of his everyday reality by seeking solace in the ragtime tune 'Some of these Days'. His fascination with the tune encapsulates Sartre's nascent philosophical and ideological views. Sartre uses Roquentin's response to the tune as a means to reconcile two fundamentally opposed states of being—être pour-soi ('being for-itself ') and être en-soi ) ('being of-itself '). Roquentin's embrace of 'Some of these Days' and, conversely, his disdain for unspecif ied Chopin preludes, reflects Sartre's emergent class-consciousness. Sartre's mistaken belief that the tune was composed by a Jew and performed by an African-American (the reverse was actually the case) is not as naive as it seems.