Existential Hero: The Portrait of a Lonely Individual in the Novel Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

The article is devoted to the literary analysis of existential concepts in J.-P. Sartre’s novel “Nausea”. Existentialism is a tendency from the philosophical background that emphasizes the superiority and alienation of human experience in the world. From existentialists’ point of view, human life is meaningless, though people can influence over their fate through freedom of choice.
The aim of this article is to analyze the novel “Nausea” according to existentialism. The tasks of the research are: to reveal key existential concepts; to clarify the image of the existential hero. In our research, we used historical-cultural, comparative, and psychological methods, implying theories established by S.Kierkegaard, I.Murdoch, C.Wilson, A.Camus, and J.-P. Sartre himself.
J.-P. Sartre (1905-1980) was a French philosopher and writer who refused the Nobel Prize in 1964. His most well-known fictional work is the novel “Nausea”, published in 1938. In this work, the author shows the lonely individual who tries to overcome the existential crisis. The object of our research is the main hero of this novel, whom we labeled as an outsider, or an existential hero.
As the research result, we created an integral chain of the existential state of an outsider character. The whole novel portrays the life path of a protagonist, who goes through the existential state that includes transcendental steps like alienation, awakening, freedom, absurdity, and authenticity with the help of artistic narrating such as stream of consciousness. 
The conclusion of the research includes several findings. Firstly, the novel “Nausea” clearly can be considered a model of an existential novel as it embraces all core concepts of existentialism. Many British writers who investigated J.-P. Sartre, such as I.Murdoch, C.Wilson, and H.Barnes criticized his existentialism for being pessimistic and egocentric, though this criticism cannot deny J.-P. Sartre’s great contribution to the development of contemporary literature.