First, we must understand that Sartre is a new kind of pamphleteer. To kill himself would be an act of faith-he can’t do that! All he can do is lug his body through this stale joke of a life until he’s taken. At the end of the book Roquentin doesn’t know what to do. Everything is nada, nada, nada, if you remember Hemingway’s little story. He has a girl-friend with whom he sleeps in a mechanical way and he quits that, too. Roquentin, an intellectual, is bored to the death with the meaninglessness of his (and all) life and soon quits writing his book. What is the story about? A fellow of thirty named Antoine Roquentin is working on a biography of an old French scoundrel who lived a hundred or more years ago. There is just a rotten day-by-day existence. In this first book there is none of that. The need to storm a heaven that isn’t there came later, you can find it in Sartre’s plays. For this book-it is charity to call it a “novel”-finds everyday life rotten. It was begotten by those things, but before the war. My notion had been that Sartre’s leap had come right out of the fighting, that This was Sartre’s first “novel”-the first spurt of this Niagara Falls of letters.
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