Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic.
Nausea
Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote La Nausée in 1938 while he was a college professor. The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected researcher in a town who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.
Fresh from several years of travel, 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin settles in the French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932 a “sweetish sickness” he calls nausea increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys — his research project, the company of “The Self-Taught Man” who is reading all the books in the library, a pleasant physical relationship with a cafe owner named Francoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved … even his own hands and the beauty of nature. Antoine is facing the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself; he embodies Sartre’s theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.
No Exit
Originally published in French in 1944 as Huis Clos, the play features only four characters (one of whom appears for only a very limited time), and one set. No Exit is the source of the famous Sartreian maxim, “Hell is other people”.
The play begins with a bellhop leading a man named Garcin into a hotel room (the play portrays Hell as a gigantic hotel, and realization of where the action is taking place dawns on the audience in the opening minutes). The room has no windows and only one door. Eventually Garcin is joined by a woman (Inez), and then another (Estelle). After their entry, the bellhop bolts the door shut. All expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize, they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively, by probing each other’s sins, desires, and unpleasant memories. At first, the three see events concerning them that are happening on earth, though they can only observe and listen, but eventually (as their connection to Earth dwindles and the living move on) they are left with only their own thoughts and the company of the other two.
Vade Mecum 