Antoine Roquentin Timeline and Summary

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• Antoine decides to start keeping a journal because he doesn't want to miss any changes that might happen to his thoughts or personality as the days go by.
• The more we read Antoine's thoughts, the more we realize that he's a bored loner. The guy has enough money so that he never has to work, so he spends his days in the library of a town called Bouville to write a history book on an obscure 18th-century politician named the Marquis de Rollebon.
• The one other person whom Antoine knows at the library is a guy he refers to as the Self-Taught Man. This dude is going through the entire library and trying to read every book in alphabetical order.
• When he gets tired of the library, Antoine likes to go to the bar in the Bouville train station and drink. When he's not drinking, he's going upstairs to have sex with the owner of the bar, a woman with a big sexual appetite who keeps many lovers apart from Antoine.
• As Antoine spends his days walking around Bouville, he often feels like the objects around him are closing in on him and gets sick to his stomach. He refers to this feeling as his "Nausea."
• On Sundays, Antoine likes to join the crowds coming out of the main church in Bouville and walk among them. Being among the crowds somehow makes him feels less lonely and lonelier at the same time.
• One day, he gets a letter at his apartment. It is from his ex lover Anny, and she says she wants to see him in nearly a week's time. Antoine is overjoyed, since this is the most exciting thing that's happened to him in a long time.
• Antoine goes to one of his favorite places to eat one morning and finds out that the owner hasn't come down from his room. After a half-hour passes, Antoine concludes that the owner must be dead in his bed. Pretty morbid, but sure Antoine. Whatever you say.
• It turns out that the owner is totally fine, but just suffering from the flu. Antoine almost feels disappointed.
• One day, Antoine sits down for lunch with the Self-Taught Man from the library. He claims he doesn't want to do it, but no doubt agrees because he'd like some company, just like the Self-Taught Man would.
• As they talk, the Self-Taught Man reveals that he was a prisoner of war during WWI. During this experience, he spent a lot of time cooped up with other soldiers and became addicted to the feeling of being among men. He says that the experience turned him into a humanist, meaning that he thinks the goal of life is to create as much happiness and prosperity for as many humans as possible.
• Antoine, though, can't help but voice his objection to this philosophy. He swears that there is no point to human life. There is only existence and non-existence. People exist, then they don't, and there's no more to it than that.
• The Self-Taught Man won't listen to Antoine, and he declares that he'll never believe Antoine doesn't love his fellow man. There's just no convincing the Self-Taught Man of otherwise on this issue.
• Eventually, Antoine feels his Nausea starting to come on, so he excuses himself and leaves the luncheon. He walks around Bouville for a while and finally feels like he has reached the climax of his intellectual journey. He has been searching for the truth of existence and he has found it.
• A few days later, Antoine goes to see his ex lover Anny in her hotel room. They have a short conversation about the good ol' days, and Antoine admits that he was always a bad boyfriend to Anny.
• Anny says this is a shame, since she has found a man who buys her lots of nice things. In other words, it's too late for Antoine to get her back. She gets on a train the next day and leaves him, probably forever.
• Alone again, Antoine decides to give up his history research project and move to Paris. Before leaving, he pays one last visit to the library. When he gets there, he sees the Self-Taught Man making sexual advances to a high school boy.
• The librarian screams at the Self-Taught Man and kicks him out. Antoine tries to defend the little guy, but the Self-Taught Man wants to be alone. He has been banished from the library, and Antoine figures that the guy is going to go off and kill himself out of shame.
• Antoine visits the bar in the Bouville train station before leaving and says goodbye to his sexual partner, the owner. Before leaving, he also asks the waitress to pay his favorite record one last time before he leaves.
• While listening to the record, Antoine thinks about the person who wrote it, and about how this person no longer exists. His song still exists, but according to Antoine, this doesn't have any significance in terms of the dead songwriter's legacy. There is only existence and non-existence, and the songwriter doesn't exist anymore. In other words, it's as if he was never alive to begin with.