"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm."

"I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity."

What does it mean, as Sartre remarks, to be in the way? In Nausea, Roquentin is a character of imageless import – a tea-cup dilettante strangled by small, uncomfortable moments. The narrative is sludgy and moribund, the French quarter lapping at the juice of fetishistic period-writing; a scrutiny of the work produces the fond knowledge that language, in subconscious audible Wittgenstein, is a mutinous impediment. Sartre’s characters play as witty little devices of churlish beauty, perhaps facile, sparingly dull. The danger of Roquentin’s being exists in his approach to the world as a backdrop, an incomplete still-life housing filthy smudged brush-strokes – in a word, human beings. Familiar to the pattern of crisis which acts the filter to each passing moment, each individual “now,” is the overwhelming shape of despondency – of little fingers running down the length of a hair-lock, gauging its brittleness, considering it. It’s purposeless to simply ignore the hair-lock, the “what’s-there,” as much as it is to pursue it. It’s nothing more than what it is, and it could never be what it isn’t – it isn’t able to not be; it’s in the way. The man on the train flicks his head back to create an aversion as you pass; the birth of an illusion: “I’m not here, in fact, I should like to say I don’t notice you.” But the ephemeral stranger is the ephemeral moment; the conduction of moments from causes, from things in the way. Freedom, for the man on the train, is truly impossible in that setting; he may close his eyes to the world, or hold his head back as to be disregarded, but he is certainly there – and we regard him, and take hold of him in our eyes, so that his existence features before us like an extraordinary tragedy; it is the choice of the stranger to surrender him. Or maybe the man on the train fails to shift his head at all, but rather focuses plainly into the eyes of the stranger – maybe the stranger reads the deadness of the man’s eyes, like a pair of swollen, swimming epitaphs. Maybe certain miserable words are exchanged – maybe nothing, but just enough so as to have something to put up with. Human experience is startling, and never so merciful as to be subtle.