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That's living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it's a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories: things happen and we tell about them in the opposite sense.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea1
Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea, which he saw as one of his most important works, is often seen as "the very model of a philosophical novel."2 But how is it possible to express philosophical truth in a literary form? One might write a novel in which a fictitious character named "Jenny Fodor" defends Jerry Fodor's "language of thought" thesis,3 but that kind of trivial case is not what Sartre means. What Sartre means here is the kind of case in which the expression of philosophical truth is essentially bound up with its expression in a literary form. The particular philosophical truth in question is Sartre's view in Being and Nothingness, with which Nausea is closely connected, that human life is inherently paradoxical.4 I argue that Sartre attempts to show that one can never consistently or adequately describe human life in a story by putting his novel Nausea in the form of a new kind of literary liar paradox. That is, Sartre builds a self-referential paradox into the very literary form of presentation in Nausea that attempts to show that a story about human life is true if and only if it is false.
Section 1 discusses Sartre's paradoxical ontology of human life in Being and Nothingness. Section 2 addresses the main themes in Nausea relevant here. Section 3 sketches the basic features of the "simple liar paradox" (hereafter SLP) on which I focus. Section 4 shows how the philosophical picture in Nausea takes the form of a literary variant of SLP. Section 5 explains how Sartre builds this logical paradox into Nausea to illustrate his view that it is impossible truly to represent human life in a novel. Section 6 clarifies the present interpretation by showing why Robert Champigny's ascription of a liar paradox to Sartre is quite different from the present interpretation.5
I
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