Harper Lee’s “Watchman” (post 3) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea” (post 4) have protagonists with Nausea, Dissociative Fugue, “First-Half Multiple Personality”

In my recent post on Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman (which was later revised and edited to become her classic, To Kill a Mockingbird), I noted that her protagonist, Jean Louise Finch, responded to her discovering that her idolized father was a racist by having a severe bout of nausea and a two-hour dissociative fugue.

And that reminded me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, whose protagonist has dissociative fugues on a much grander scale.

Another similarity between the two novels is that the multiple personality issues—Jean Louise Finch’s duality and Sartre’s “sudden transformations”—are described in the first half of the novel and later mostly forgotten. Since I have seen this happen in other novels, too, I am coining a term for it: “first-half multiple personality.” 

July 14, 2015

Nobel Prize novelist Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea:  The novel’s opening—saying the protagonist's “sudden transformations” must be explained—is totally forgotten

“Sudden Transformations”

The novel begins with the protagonist’s worry about his “sudden transformations.” For example, due to some kind of change that suddenly came over him, he left France and went to Indo-China, and then, after six years, he suddenly reverted to his regular self and returned to France.

He is trying to understand what is wrong with him, and is worried that he will have another “sudden transformation”:

“I have to admit that I am subject to these sudden transformations…That is what has given my life this halting, incoherent aspect. When I left France, for example, there were a lot of people who said I had gone off on a sudden impulse…

“And then, all of a sudden, I awoke from a sleep which had lasted six years…I couldn’t understand why I was in Indo-China. What was I doing there?…[And so he returned to France]…

“If I am not mistaken, and if all the signs which are piling up are indications of a fresh upheaval in my life, well then, I am frightened…I’m afraid of what is going to be born and take hold of me and carry me off—I wonder where? Shall I have to go away again…Shall I awake in a few months, a few years, exhausted, disappointed…I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late” (1, pp. 14-15).

Author Forgets Sudden Transformations

Amazingly, the rest of the novel makes no mention of sudden transformations. Instead, the protagonist’s problem becomes “nausea,” which eventually leads to his epiphany about existence (1, p. 182), “absurdity” (1, p. 185), and “contingency” (1, p. 188), and his discovery that he might prevent Nausea by becoming a novelist (1, pp. 245-246).

Multiple Personality

The protagonist is described at the beginning of the novel as having the two cardinal symptoms of multiple personality: personality switches and amnesia. And he did not have just the one six-year fugue. He says that he is prone to these sudden transformations, which are what has given his life its “halting, incoherent aspect.”

1. Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea [1938]. London, Penguin Books, 2000.