Sexuality, Shame, and Sanity: Inconsistencies and Projections of Physicality in the Fragmented Narratives of Simone de Beauvoir
May 1, 2025
In Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 groundbreaking feminist work The Second Sex, she details that, due to the patriarchal system of modern-day society, women have been forced into submission solely on account of their gender. While a thinker in her own right, Beauvoir cites concepts from German philosophy, saying, “Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.” Hegel was also well known for his work in fleshing out the idea of the Subject and the Object, the perception that one will always be viewed by another. Beauvoir combines these ideas, finding that in contemporary society, the male body functions as the Subject while the female body is the Object, or the Other. When the male “asserts himself” as the “subject and free being,” she writes, “On this account she is led to make an object of her whole self, to set up herself as the Other.”
In The Second Sex, however, Beauvoir refrains from discussing the physical form of the woman in relation to one’s perspective as a female. She writes, “the body is not a thing, it is a situation… it is the instrument of our grasp upon the world, a limiting factor for our projects." The physical form of a woman, with her lack of penis yet the presence of breasts in its stead, displays her gender for onlookers to see. Rather, she urges the reader that femininity is viewed through one’s personal experiences, not their body. In the 21st century, many genders and sexes are recognized, yet during the time of Beauvoir’s writing, her book focuses only on male and female, so this viewpoint will be utilized in the coming writing.
The concept of physicality in Beauvoir’s work is notable when comparing her works of fiction (most of which are based on her real-life experiences) with her non-fiction or memoir. However, Beauvoir’s breadth of work also contains another rarely shared medium, her frequent, and often quite personal, letters and diary entries. While Beauvoir published multiple books of letter exchanges and diaries herself, more personal works such as Les Inséparables (2021) (which details her close friendship with Zaza Lecoin, who died young) and Wartime Diary (2008) were put into print after her 1986 death by her adopted daughter Sylvie. According to The Guardian, Beauvoir’s literary agency believed that Les Inséparables “was ‘too intimate’ to be published in Beauvoir’s lifetime”. The same case could be made for her journals from World War II, where she details her romantic affairs, occurring both with Parisian men but also her sixteen-year-old students. Beauvoir and her life partner Jean-Paul Sartre’s shared fondness for underage girls or ‘barely legal’ young women continued throughout their 50-year relationship. In fact, the respective executors of Sartre Beauvoir’s wills are both women with whom the couple had affairs then subsequently adopted, due to their being young, without family, and financially insecure: Sylvie Le Bon-de Beauvoir met her in 1960 at age 17 and Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre met him in 1956 at age 21.
These diaries, nearly complete novels, and epistolary compilations display a secondary side of the esteemed author. For Beauvoir, known today as a feminist figurehead and innovative author, her fragmented works reveal her true thoughts on personal topics. In her writings regarding Nathalie Sorokine, the 17-year-old girl whose sexual relationship with both Beauvoir and Sartre caused the former to be suspended from teaching in 1942, there is an evident shift in her descriptions between her published memoir Prime of Life (1965) and Wartime Diary. Beauvoir wrote of Sorokine in Prime of Life, “All the same I found her a godsend: she was as tough and daring and enterprising as a boy, and I had great fun in her company,” yet writes in Wartime Diaries of being “startled and annoyed” when they would kiss. Her depictions of Sorokine are from the same year; the former quotation was from July 1939, and the latter was in January of 1940.
The intimacy of these diaries and letters (most of which were portions of an exchange between Beauvoir and Sartre) do not aim to offer a life lesson. Her fragmented narratives instead reveal genuine love, fear, and human emotion. In this informal setting, meaning works that she herself did not deem publishable or diary entries impulsively etched into her journal, she discusses women and their physicality in a format unseen in her novels. Rather than writing in order to execute an existential point, her words in her fragmented media are driven by physical desire, complemented by corporeal descriptions, presumably included in order to aid Sartre’s understanding.
In modern literary analysis, one is taught to separate the art from the artist. For Beauvoir, her real life is reflected in her writings. Additionally, Sartre featured their escapades in his novels and works as well, drawing ideas and inspiration from the half-century-long open relationship. For example, Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay (1943) details a semi-fictional take on her and Sartre’s sexual activity with two sisters, Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz. In real life, Olga, a Russian immigrant, was one of Beauvoir’s students in 1933, and they would spend time together frequently outside of school hours. Two years later, when Olga was 19 years old, the couple helped her pay for schooling and moved her into a room in the hotel where they both lived. She and Beauvoir had begun a sexual relationship, the latter being seven years older than the former, despite the professorial power dynamic. Sartre repeatedly attempted to sleep with Olga, and upon her denials, he successfully began a sexual relationship with her younger sister Wanda, who was twelve years younger than him. As an adult, Olga married Jacques-Laurent Bost, with whom Beauvoir (as well as several of her other underage lovers) had also been intimate. Louis Menand writes in a 2005 New Yorker article on the couple’s often intertwining romantic experiences, “This is where you need a scorecard.”
Beauvoir and Sartre famously never married. She writes in The Second Sex that marriage allows a man to “satisfy his desires on her without consulting her opinion.” In the same vein, she views sexual intercourse between a married couple as warped due to the committment, saying that the erotic attraction “dies… in an atmosphere of esteem and friendship”. Further, due to their becoming one, the carnality of sex is removed because “giving and… conquering” are no longer present. She also cites Michel de Montaigne, who, due to the rivalling powers of familial love and sexual love, equated sex within a marriage to incest.
Menand writes, “Sartre and Beauvoir liked to refer to their entourage as 'the Family,' and the recurring feature of their affairs is a kind of play incest.” Applying the Montaignian lens, Beauvoir and Sartre’s act of adopting girls with whom they had already established sexual relationships acts as a multi-faceted incestual pairing. This ‘familial’ romance could also be widened to incorporate the multiple girls that Beauvoir and Sartre ‘shared,’ but more importantly, the splitting of siblings between the two. In Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2006), Hazel Rowley analyzes the ‘tumultuous’ back-and-forth nature of the couple’s affairs. Rowley suggests that because 44-year-old Beauvoir had fallen in love with Sartre’s 27-year-old secretary Claude Lanzmann, 48-year-old Sartre promptly began sleeping with Evelyn, Lanzmann’s 23-year-old sister. In a letter to Nelson Algren in 1954, an American writer with whom Beauvoir engaged in a long-term relationship, she described Lanzmann as “rather a kind of incestuous son than a lover… he asks for a motherly tenderness rather than something else.” Lanzmann was the only man Beauvoir lived with, and, although scant in comparison, more than a hundred letters have been recorded between the two. In his own evaluation of Beauvoir during a 1981 interview, Algren likened Beauvoir’s repeated cycle of love turning to usage to prostitution, saying, even in “whorehouses… the woman there always closes the door… but [Beauvoir] flung the door open and called in the public and the press.” In 1953, Beauvoir writes to Lanzmann, “My darling child, you are my first absolute love, the one that only happens once (in life) or maybe never. I thought I would never say the words that now come naturally to me when I see you – I adore you. I adore you with all my body and soul.” This letter is the only one published online — all other pieces are housed in Yale’s Rare Book Library, no photography allowed. Her words here are light, airy, and teeming with true care. In Rowley’s chapter on the pair’s first moments, entitled ‘Crystal Blue Eyes’, she writes that Beauvoir was especially attracted to Lanzmann’s “dark hair and crystal blue eyes." In Lanzmann’s 2011 memoir, her same attraction is echoed: “I loved the veil of her voice, her blue eyes, the purity of her face, and, more especially, of her nostrils.” In a separate work by Rowley, an article on her personal connections and experiences while interviewing Beauvoir in 1976, she writes of the 68-year-old, “her skin was creamy, and her blue eyes sparkled with intelligence.” Pairing the instance of her age-gap relationship with Lanzmann with Rowley’s assessment of the aging writer, Beauvoir’s blue eyes act as a preservation of her youth. In Force of Circumstance (1968), another Beauvoir memoir, Beauvoir writes, “Lanzmann’s presence beside me freed me from my age.” By refusing to acknowledge her own age, Beauvoir dually affirms her own freedom. If man as Subject forces women into becoming Object, man then lives in a world of his own creation. His status is given to him by societal rulings. It is interesting, then, that Beauvoir feels that she may only reclaim her own youth through the action of a man recognizing her beauty — she will not allow herself alone to come to this understanding.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes of aging women, “if she has no other resources than the exploitation of her physical charms, she will battle step by step to preserve them; she will struggle madly also if her sexual desires remain lively.” Her bright blue eyes, as evidenced by the several aforementioned anecdotes, exist as one ‘charm.’ Another, more applicable to the average woman, is the feature of breasts. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir says that when a girl gets breasts, they “becom[e] an object that others see and pay attention to.” However, as a young girl begins to receive unwanted attention from male onlookers, the very part of her body that once ‘proved’ her femininity then becomes strange: “She would like to be invisible, it frightens her to become flesh and to show her flesh.” The body of the girl has, overnight, become her personal selling point in hopes of gaining a partner.
Beauvoir’s typist passed away in 1952 of breast cancer, which led Beauvoir to get a checkup. Her doctor found a tumor near her breast, which, although it turned out to be benign, frightened the 44-year-old Beauvoir. Her letters from that year, writes Diane Beeson, “are filled with descriptions of herself as aging, old, or, in many instances too old for any number of things.” This medical moment marked a point where Beauvoir found solid ‘proof’ of her real age. In addition, she writes in a diary entry from the day she received the initial result that if she had to get a mastectomy, “I could count on twelve or so more years of life.” Evidence of her age was not just present in the mirror, but rather it was now physically internal as well, in parts that she would never be able to actually look at.
In Wartime Diary, 31-year-old Beauvoir pokes fun at Bianca Bienenfeld, another one of her 18-year-old student lovers. Wartime Diaries captures Beauvoir as she dances through her early thirties, sipping coffee with one freshly 18-year-old student and getting wine drunk with a different one that same night. One critique of this text is Beauvoir’s lack of historical context, which Elizabeth C. Bachner notes in a column titled “Lying and Nothingness.” Bachner writes that Bianca, who is a Jewish immigrant from Poland and eventually had family members who were killed in concentration camps, was actively discarded at the same time as the Nazis are actively rounding up Jewish people. Beauvoir writes on December 10, 1939, “How amusing that [Bianca] is upset at the idea that in ten years we’ll be too old for her to love us. In short, she freely wants to stop her love, she will be free in stopping it, and she is free in its anticipation.” For taking this mindset, Beauvoir then calls the girl “terribly self-interested.” Yet, her closing line reads, “We returned home and for part of the passionate night I was a bit carried away, body and soul.” In the following entry, Beauvoir then spends time with Olga and Nathalie, separately, and writes happily about the experiences. In a letter to Sartre from November 10, 1939, Beauvoir describes feeling ‘suffocated’ by the constant attention of the three girls (as well as Bost and two other unnamed individuals with whom she was sexually involved). However, she ends the note saying, “No more jealousy regarding Bienenfeld – that’s quite dead. It’s dead along with my esteem - it was that esteem which used to affect me (I still esteem her, of course, but not as an equal).” Her letter from the same day, featured in Wartime Diaries, reveals that she spent November 9th through the 12th hanging out with Olga, Nathalie, and Bianca. Here, her descriptions of the individual girls continue to segment, showing particular favor, as Beauvoir assesses: “I had seen [Olga] in the evening, looking fresh and beautiful. She looks more and more like the forbidden fruit while [Bianca] seems to me like an old mistress with her demands, her claims to entitlements, and implacable presence.” This language is strikingly artificial, with Beauvoir pitting the two women against each other. Her likening of Bianca to an old mistress is of further note, given their 13-year age gap. Perhaps Beauvoir’s goal in this description was to approach the situation through a male point of view, shrinking down Bianca’s image in Sartre’s mind. Unsurprisingly, Beauvoir and Sartre soon split off from Bianca. Their cutting off of the young girl stems from the trio’s three fiery and stubborn personalities, each with their own individual resentments, but Hazel Barnes theorizes that Beauvoir commanded Sartre to cease his communication with her due to overwhelming jealousy.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir cites a case by French psychologist Pierre Janet of a girl who began to fear her own body and its changes: getting pimples, gaining or losing too much weight, and body hair. The 18-year-old fell into this rut from receiving constant stares and found that the only solution was to starve herself within an empty room, barely going outside, feeling that “her appearance was so horrible that to be seen was intolerable.” Janet’s case study helps to demonstrate shame as a product of objectification.
Despite Beauvoir’s middle-agedness, she too is haunted by the pimple, physical marks against her natural beauty. “I have such an ugly pimple on my cheek… it’s horrible and gives me sleepless nights,” she writes to Sartre in June 1939. She discussed the same acne flareup in person with him that same month, according to Sartre’s personal diary, saying, “You gave it to me, with your bad food; you’re full of them, I told you to change your diet but you refuse to listen, I won’t tell you again.” This single exchange, while the couple sat on the patio of Café de Flore, broke into a days-long argument. It is clear that Beauvoir is still haunted by her own physical insecurity of self.
Preceding intercourse, Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, the act of the penis becoming erect serves as the “imperious expression of a subjectivity.” The erect penis commands that it is time for sex to commence, but it only becomes erect if the girl is deemed worthy, that is, is physically beautiful enough. The girl subconsciously transforms into an entity, an object to be desired. However, if she enjoys her own body too much, she is viewed as either self-centered or as sexually promiscious (i.e. a ‘whore’), resulting in shame in either instance. The French slang term ‘la putain’, meaning ‘a whore,’ is derived from the Latin word pūtidus, meaning to stink and/or decay. A woman’s hygiene and the morality with which she executes her sexual desires are tied. In the same vein, there exists in the English language no word for a male whore, save for terms like ‘man-slut’ or ‘man-whore.’ By tacking on the ‘man,’ it is established that just ‘slut’ equals a woman.
In Bianca’s memoir, A Disgraceful Affair (1993), she details the first time that she allowed Sartre to sleep with her. Soon after informing the girl of his feelings, Sartre turned the conversation to focus purely on how they would have sex. As they walked to his room, Sartre informed her that he had taken a girl’s virginity the night before, in the same bed that he was motioning her towards. He, almost twice her age, undressed, washed his feet in the sink, and then ‘mocked’ Bianca when she did not promptly take off her clothes. They did not have sex that night, though she notes that it did occur later that same week. On January 11, 1940, in one of her last diary entries mentioning Bianca, Beauvoir writes, “I slept at [Bianca’s] place. Physical disgust, disgust of her skin, especially of her odor, a fecal odor and her mawkish face.” The passion she once held for the young girl has been replaced by an assault on her physical person, more specifically, on her stench. Beauvoir pens a similar entry within the same week to Sartre, saying, “If I’m to tell you everything, in addition to the rufous odour of her body she had a pungent fecal odour which made things pretty unpleasant. So far as friendship with her goes, no problem—but our physical relations couldn’t be more distasteful to me.” Her blatant honesty to Sartre was not new, but her words, dripping with disapproval and even resentment, reflect a recently acquired sexual carelessness. Her targeting of Bianca’s smell, despite multiple reports of Beauvoir and Sartre both having a constant stinking odor, helps to establish her as dirty as a result of either her financial state or her promiscuity. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir notes the frequency of young women’s “disgust” with the smell of her own menstrual blood when she begins menstruation. When the woman is able to sexually reproduce, the newfound odor is the first sign of change. Nevertheless, the ‘expert’ on femininity at the time exposes their shared lover, in an act of possible defamation and jealousy. The same woman who was lauded as a feminist icon and who had put into words the frustrations of mid-century housewives was seemingly putting her flings through the same cycle of usage and discardment that she once used to describe the patriarchy.
“The idea of feminism or the sex war made no sense to me,” Beauvoir wrote in 1965. According to the Library of Congress, Beauvoir did not consider herself a feminist “until a 1972 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur at the time of the founding of the feminist journal Questions Féministes.” Bachner believes that her feminist-alligning views in The Second Sex helped to reinforce her as a philosopher rather than an “embittered forty-year-old bisexual with stolen dreams”. A Reddit commenter describes her as “Simone de Beauvoir, the pedophile that hated families!” The Guardian’s review of Rowley’s book is a “narrative is a sordid and emetic chronicle of sexual abuse, emotional manipulation and moral blackmail.” Upon Rowley’s release of the book two decades ago, she told The Guardian that she feared the book “could set off a stream of pronouncements on De Beauvoir's sex life, including "cruel, sadistic, manipulating, lying and all these stupid words." Although these sexual happenings occurred fifty years ago, the fixation on age of consent laws remains. This paper does not serve to criminalize Beauvoir, though the above comments should be noted. The aim of this paper is not to denounce Beauvoir nor to break apart her contributions to feminism.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir established a new take on femininity, combining biology, psychology, philosophy, and sociology to explore exactly why women have been tasked with such hostility. Her endpoint, although it appears a quarter into the work, is that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society.” Becoming a woman is a learned process, inflicted upon one by the system of power exuded by the patriarchy. Her feminist philosophy therefore elides the concept of the physical body in relation to gender. Yet, the emphasis on physicality found in her fragmented literature almost directly opposes this sentiment. There is an evident duplicity when comparing her intimate musings between friends and lovers to her published memoirs. Filled with ruminations on shame, acceptance, love, and sensuality, Simone de Beauvoir’s fragmented narratives display a rare side of the distinguished thinker, presenting an authentic and uncertain self led by an innate and ambiguous feminine desire.
Conscious Callbacks: Repetition as a Guide for Understanding Antoine’s Perceptions of Anny
February 25, 2025
My passage is, in my book, from the end of page 144 to the middle of page 145 (beginning with “She does not say a single word.” and ending with “They disgust me.” This passage captures the end of Anny’s monologue about her own troubles in the past five years since she had seen Antoine last, and leads into the beginning of the narrator’s own monologue, which gets abruptly cut off. In her discussion of ‘perfect moments,’ which perfectly mirrors Antoine’s personal interpretation of the concept of adventures, Anny throttles forward in her retellings, but her own disdain for herself and what she has become is evident in her verbiage. Given that the story of Nausea is told purely through Antoine’s journal entries, the narrator’s own preferences and opinions seep through his retellings, tainting his ability to be a reliable narrator. During his meeting with Anny, she uses terms frequently equipped by Antoine in the prior chapters. While this may have been what Anny truly said to him in these moments, the repetition could also be viewed as Antoine warping his love interest into a partner who would fit and understand him in his current mindset.
This specific passage is where Antoine seems to identify the similarities between himself and his past lover, that, despite their time apart, they have both fallen into their own separate situations of nausea. While the closing entries of the book highlight how frequent this ‘sickness’ is with the general public, Antoine seems almost shocked at hearing how Anny has become so vindictive yet weary of her own existence. His realization of this comparison comes as she says that identifying objects “disgust[s]” (p. 145) her. This word is repeated often throughout the novel, utilized when Antoine feels his nausea set in towards a certain object or occurrence. When he hears Anny use this term, Antoine is reigned back in, after not acknowledging her love for him, he begins to realize that their shared distaste for the world could actually bring them closer together. Even their names match — Anny could be viewed as a nickname for Antoine. Sartre may have chosen these names as a subconscious motion for the reader to hope for them to rejoin as a couple. Whether or not that is the case, their similar names also shadow their closeness, even from afar and even years later.
After informing Antoine that she “used to be capable of rather splendid passions. I hated my mother passionately… I loved you passionately,” (p. 144) Anny says, “I know I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion…. I live surrounded by my dead passions,” (p. 145). Antoine frequently writes on his passions and how he does not live up to them, but he also uses the term to capture his jealousness of others— “Worn and furrowed by life and passions. But the doctor has understood life, mastered his passions” (p. 98). However, Anny’s noting of her “dead passions” coincides with Antoine’s first entry. Upon seeing a statue and feeling nothing towards it, his nausea begins to set in for the first time, though he has not yet given it a name. “Why was I talking to these people? Why was I dressed so oddly? My passion was dead” (p. 5). Antoine’s focus on his passion combines his inner need to be productive with his own journey of finding, and testing, what he thought were his interests. As he strives to find a new project to commit to to replace his Rollebon research, Anny serves as a reminder of Antoine’s ‘past’ life.
While this line is the first in the selected passage, it shall be focused on last, as it is the phrase that seems to stick with Antoine the most. As she ends her monologue, Anny utters, “I outlive myself” (p. 144). The aforementioned two examples highlight Anny unknowingly repeating Antoine’s oft-used words, but Antoine intentionally repeats her sentence as he reflects after their meeting. “Now I am going to be like Anny, I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar” (p. 157). While Anny’s definition of outliving herself suggests that she has already died but must continue on meaninglessly, the narrator seems to have adapted his own mindset to fit what she had said to him. In the final pages of the novel, Antoine writes, “Consciousness exists as a tree, as a blade of grass. It slumbers, it grows bored” (p. 170). Reflecting upon her concept of outliving oneself, Antoine has decided to begin to shed his negative mindset. Seeing her suffer from his same ‘sickness,’ Antoine has decided to contort her concept in order to simultaneously escape and accept his existence.
In this single selected section of Anny and Antoine’s lengthy and combative conversation, the narrator acknowledges the similarities between his and her articulations of their shared struggle. Only once Anny has kicked him out of her home and taken the train home is Antoine able to see beyond the ‘nothing’ that he constantly felt surrounded by. After hearing her speak on her disdain for the world using terms like “dead passions” and “disgust”, Antoine is almost Pavlovian in his initial responses. These words hit him like an alarm bell, and her repetition of his past phrases helps to bolster their shared sorrows in the eyes of the reader. After time, though, it is his turn to reuse a line spoken by her, yet it is clear that he has grown beyond her mindset.
Comparisons in Camus’ The Stranger and Sartre’s Nausea
April 12, 2025
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin and Albert Camus’ Meursault are both men detached from their surroundings, navigating their social standing in realms that neither character desires to fully understand. Roquentin, of Nausea (1938), and Meursault, of The Stranger (1942), are both encapsulated within the existentialist theories that Sartre and Camus routinely emphasized and brought into the mainstream of philosophical thought. However, the two protagonists deviate in their individual perceptions of self-discovery throughout the novels, culminating in dual concepts of authenticity. Roquentin, on his path to defining his own existence, struggles with his physical affliction of the titular nausea, which he allows to rule his daily life. When he watches strangers, subsequently judging their pretentiousness or excitement, he is stricken by corporeal sensations, which he labels frequently as ‘disgust’. On the other hand, Meursault lacks empathy and the ability to understand his own emotions, which results in an indifference to crises. When he is informed by his neighbor Salamano that some townspeople were displeased with Meursault sending his dying mother to a nursing home, Meursault explains the situation away as “the natural thing” (The Stranger, p. 45) since “she was all bored by herself” (Ibid.), failing to contemplate that he could have kept her company. The first line of the work even reveals his disinterest in others, with the notable “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” revealing his closeness, using the more tender French term meaning ‘mommy,’ while still neglecting to care for her passing. He does not even know her age (p. 16). Roquentin and Meursault are similar characters — unreliable narrators with an inability to measure the happenings around them. Throughout each novel, though, the two main characters are seemingly only disrupted by one thing: light, the intangibility of which neither are able to fully comprehend.
When Roquentin makes his rare ventures into the streets of Bouville, he routinely notes the fog that clouds the town (Nausea, p. 24, 98) and the dimly lit, deserted sidewalks that he finds solace in. In the undated pages, he sees from his window a “sad little group” (p. 8) waiting for a tram, hunched underneath a streetlight. He makes a remark that they have a long time to wait, as Roquentin knows when the next tram comes, ridiculing the unknowing crowd. Within the dated pages, after he has begun to label and realize his bouts of nausea, Roquentin sits in the mid-afternoon, watching the light reveal clumps of dust on his windowsill, which he realizes has also illuminated his hands. “When the sun begins shining like that the best thing to do is go to bed,” (p. 24) he writes, yet as he is not tired, he must stay strong until the sun sets. He reflects on the previous night, how the nighttime rain kept people inside, and the peace that that offered him. Even during this eerie time of evening, he realizes, the cafés remained lit. In this moment, he creates an association that spaces with light will attract and contain people, hence, he will now avoid them, and specifically, avoid the light. “When it is dark, the objects and I will come out of limbo,” (p. 25) he writes, displaying how nighttime is when he feels safe to leave his apartment. Later that afternoon, Roquentin notes that cafés were once “my only refuge because they were full of people and well lighted” (p. 29), yet now he must avoid them, as his nausea has begun to affect him inside of the café that he frequented. This is followed by a depiction of the other customers, a group of men playing cards. Clad in purple suspenders and bright blue shirts, Roquentin is overwhelmed by the bright colors, which now also bring on his nausea. After he has excited the cafe and nervously ambled around the streets for an unknown period of time, he is enveloped in grey smoke and freezing wind in an alleyway.
For Meursault, who lives in the drier and steamier climate of Algeria, the raw and unavoidable beams of the sun disrupt his daily routine. During his mother’s funeral, he is repeatedly disturbed by the heat. One of the men burying Meursault’s mother attempts to make small talk with him, “‘Pretty hot.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ A minute later he asked, ‘Is that your mother in there?’ Again I said, ‘Yes.’” (The Stranger, pg. 16). Responding in the same cadence to questions of unequal magnitude and personal meaning further reflects his distasteful nature and impersonality. Later in the novel, when Raymond and Masson are followed and knifed by two Arab men. Immediately following the encounter, Meursault stays verbally silent but notes to the reader, “By now, the sun was overpowering. It shattered into little pieces on the sand and water.” (p. 55). Still filled with adrenaline, Meursault watches the glaring sun reflect off of Raymond’s gun, which he reminds Meursault only to use if one of the Arabs pulls out a knife. Meursault, who describes his head as “ringing from the sun” (p. 57), shoots the Arab man multiple times, seemingly just because his knife glinted in the sun just as the gun did. Just before firing, Meursault narrates, “The sun was the same as it had been the day I’d buried Maman, and like then, my forehead was especially hurting me, all the veins in it throbbing under the skin.” (p. 58-9). In this moment, the sun spurs Meursault to act, taking out his pain on the Arab man as if he was the reason for the harsh heat. His noting of the similarities of the heat during his mother’s funeral and his killing of the man, justify his actions in Meursault’s moral-lacking mindset.
As Roquentin walks down the alleyway “tak[ing] three more baths of yellow light” (Nausea, p. 37). Despite his intense vow to abstain from being in pure light, Roquentin stands illuminated under the streetlamp. As he moves on walking, this moment sticks with him. He notes that he is chilly and that his ears must have reddened as he has been out so long, yet, “I no longer feel myself” (p. 39). Rather, “The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air?” (p. 40). The synthetic yellow light, although it offers him no heat, has given him a small dose of clarity. Outside of the streetlight, all else is dank and empty. His comfort is immediately interrupted by voices, which he refers to as “Two shadows.” (Ibid.) Light continues to affect Roquentin as he moves through Bouville. In the two instances where he describes his efforts to fall asleep, he sees rings of light, which morph into crosses (p. 47) and “an immense, light halo gliding in the light.” (p. 28). When he listens to music in the cafe and his nausea leaves, he describes being ‘in’ the music as “unveiling the hard smile of light.” (p. 35) Light offers Roquentin a short lapse of saneness, almost as if he has become another soul. Again, though, his brief elation is abruptly intruded upon by the men playing cards.
As Roquentin continues to insert himself into more situations, no longer fearing to enter the library or the cafés that he was once reluctant to enter, he has many instances of clarity where he bypasses the nausea (although it always ends up returning once he is disturbed). In one moment, after he sheds his long-held yearning to write on the life of Rollebon, Roquentin feels liberated in his freedom of personal choice, saying, “I exist. It’s sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you’d think it floated all by itself.” (p. 134) After his run-in with Anny, Roquentin is again left alone with his thoughts, contemplating his next move after being turned down by his ex-girlfriend. Again walking around, he writes, “Evening falls, the first lamps are lit in the city. My God! How natural the city looks despite all its geometries” (p. 214). After weeks of existential debate, and although Anny is still fresh on his mind, Roquentin has finally given in to the comfort of the lights. His use of the word ‘natural’ also reveals his inner association with light and materiality. Just as his hand was brought to his attention by the afternoon sun, the world around him is awakened when it becomes illuminated. This is further echoed in the last paragraph of the book, where he notes, “Night falls. On the second floor of the Hotel Printania two windows have just lighted up.” (p. 238). The mention of the Hotel Printania, where he lived, hints that even Roquentin will embrace the light, which frees him from his nauseating prison.
While he waits in the funeral home, Meursault stands under a skylight, appreciating that the sun’s light can be separated from its heat (The Stranger, p. 8). When Meursault is sent to jail for murder, he is constantly annoyed by the heat in his lawyer’s room, swatting at flies and adjusting the curtains (p. 69). His cell, he notes, is quiet and dark. When Marie comes to visit him, the instant change in light disrupts his perspective, but reveals the faces of several Arab prisoners also receiving visitors. In this moment, seeing the face of his lover, he recognizes that he has taken the bright rays of the outside world for granted. Now, “the alternation of light and darkness” (p. 80) is the only way for him to understand the passage of time in his cell. He has now taken a sudden interest in dawn, the beginning of a new day. He narrates, “And so I spent my nights waiting for that dawn.” (p. 113) Because he has been given a death sentence (mostly due to his indifference), Meursault has become obsessed with dawn, as that is when those who are to be executed are brought out. Therefore, he spends the late hours of the night waiting, as if enjoying his life for the last time. The concept of dawn, then could also apply to his actual life, spending his time waiting through a life that he has yet to fully conquer. After he agrees to meet with the chaplain, Meursault has a conversation about the eventuality of death. He looks up and walks over to stand under the skylight, just as he did in the funeral home (p. 118). Standing there, Meursault is bathed in the light and accidentally ignores the chaplain’s questions. In realization, he decides to listen. The chaplain continues, telling Meursault, “I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.” (p. 119) Meursault sits up attentively, and “light was streaming over my forehead” (p. 119), reminding him of the outside world. In the final moments of the piece, Meursault reflects on the privilege of love and being loved. As the light replaces his place of sun-induced pain with an illuminated halo, Meursault is reminded of the only two true things — that all will die one day, and that the sun, despite that, will continue to rise.
Throughout the book, Meursault remarks that his head feels heavy or in pain, due to the intense heat of the sun. This can be compared to Roquentin’s nausea, as Meursault’s headaches shift his mood and result in him actually following through with an action, rather than just contemplating it silently. Meursault is equally as guilty of people-watching as Roquentin, as he too spies the passersby cherishing the last moments before evening falls. In Meursault’s instance, he grows tired from watching the streetlights reflect onto the pavement but also from a bracelet. As the sky darkens, the people have left the street, and he is alone (p. 24). Light, for both characters, reveals the physicality both of themselves and of others. While humans explore during the day and flock to lit spaces like cafés at night, Roquentin and Meursault both see themselves as separate from the crowds in the first part of both books, though, light becomes their savior as they each find their understandings of existence.