Criticism of Sartre's novels frequently centered on the tension between the philosophical and political on one side, and the novelistic and individual on the other.
Ronald Aronson describes[19] the reaction of Albert Camus, still in Algeria and working on his own first novel, L’Étranger. At the time of the novel's release, Camus was a reviewer for an Algiers left-wing daily. Camus told a friend that he "thought a lot about the book" and it was "a very close part of [himself]." In his review, Camus wrote, "the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered." Camus felt that each of the book's chapters, taken by itself, "reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth." However, he also felt that the descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel are not balanced, that they "don't add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes the art of the novel." He likewise felt that Sartre had tipped the balance too far in depicting the repugnant features of mankind "instead of placing the reasons for his despair, at least to a certain degree, if not completely, on the elements of human greatness." Still, Camus's largely positive review led to a friendship between the two authors.
Philosopher G. J. Mattey describes[20] Nausea and others of Sartre's literary works as "practically philosophical treatises in literary form."
In his book Irrational Man, the philosopher William Barrett, in distinction both from Camus's feeling that Nausea is an uneasy marriage of novel and philosophy and also from Mattey's belief that it is a philosophy text, expresses[21] an opposite judgment. He writes that Nausea "may well be Sartre's best book for the very reason that in it the intellectual and the creative artist come closest to being conjoined." Barrett says that, in other literary works and in his literary criticism, Sartre feels the pull of ideas too strongly to respond to poetry, "which is precisely that form of human expression in which the poet—and the reader who would enter the poet's world—must let Being be, to use Heidegger's phrase, and not attempt to coerce it by the will to action or the will to intellectualization."
The poet Hayden Carruth agrees with Barrett, whom he quotes, about Nausea. He writes firmly[3] that Sartre, "is not content, like some philosophers, to write fable, allegory, or a philosophical tale in the manner of Candide; he is content only with a proper work of art that is at the same time a synthesis of philosophical specifications."
Barrett feels[21] that Sartre as a writer is best when "the idea itself is able to generate artistic passion and life."
The core philosophical issue of the novel is the realization that reality is fundamentally "contingent" – that it is utterly groundless – a view Sartre took from Nietzsche.[22] For Sartre, this realization is not intellectual comprehension of an abstract idea, but rather a lived experience of reality itself. Thus, instead of arguing abstractly for contingency, Nausea is a literary invitation to share the experience of contingency. From its earliest beginnings, Simone de Beauvoir recognised Nausea as the first robust expression of this key philosophical idea:
I came to realize the wealth of meaning in what he called his 'theory of contingency,' and in which were to be found already the seeds of all his ideas on being, existence, necessity, and liberty... But he wasn't making things easy for himself, for he had no intention of composing a theoretical treatise on conventional lines. He ... refused to separate philosophy from literature. In his view, Contingency was no abstract notion, but an actual dimension of real life: it would be necessary to make use of all the resources of art to make the human heart aware of that secret 'failing' which he perceived in Man and in the world around him."[23]
As the project developed, Sartre intended to follow Husserl's phenomenological maxim, "to the things themselves," and lead his audience as directly as possible to the experience of reality itself, which required the art of literature rather than the abstract prose of academic philosophy.
