Antoine Roquentin, living alone in a provincial French town, begins to experience a creeping disgust at existence itself, at the sheer thingness of things. Sartre's first novel is a philosophical diary, recording the onset of existentialist consciousness. The chestnut root that reveals the horror of Being; the self-deceiving characters in the library; the jazz recording that offers momentary respite: these images dramatize Sartre's philosophy before he wrote it as philosophy. The prose is clear and queasy. Existence precedes essence. The nausea rises. There is no exit from contingency.