Jean-Paul Sartre is credited with the “New Novel” for Nausea, the masterpiece for which he was presented a Nobel Prize (before rejecting it). The novel was written “prospectively” instead of retrospectively, like almost all literature before it (sounds similar to another project you may have heard of involving selfies, doesn’t it?)

He rejected the concept of time, significant plot development and “bourgeois values”: “…in rejecting bourgeois values he has rejected all values: man’s relation with his world is simply nauseating” (Laurenson and Swingewood. Literature and Society. Paladin Books. London, 1972 p. 226).

So basically, he’s my literary hero, or rather he’s my inspiration and I’m his hero. Today, I am Roquentin.

Roquentin’s “nausea” is very similar to my “autonomy” and here is my goal:

“One could conclude that it existed, that there was a manner of being a root, a flower, a being or a (wo)man as much as existing, who was something that I called Nausea; it was too much, it was contingent, it couldn’t surmise itself as something else, it had a certain form that challenged even (it’s own) description since it escaped words. To present it to the reader, I had to give it a form more fictional, that which was an adventure, a space of veiled intuition from the start, a little disguised, then it showed itself little by little, uncovering itself like a detective novel, if you will – at the end you expose who is guilty; who’s guilty is Eventuality.” – J.P. Sartre