Stomaching the Truth: Getting to the Roots of Nausea in the Work of Jean Paul Sartre and Flannery O’Connor

A comparison of Flannery O’Connors stories to Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea reveals a surprising number of intertextual parallels and shared themes. Upon close examination, correlations emerge within the overarching incarnational framework of each writer, manifested in similar physical responses of characters in a world that assumes God is dead. Looking at O’Connor through the descriptive lens of Nausea serves to augment a reading of O’Connor as a Christian writer attuned to the nihilism of the modern age, and contributes to an appreciation of the complexity of her vision. Despite the existential angst permeating the work of each writer, the “lines of spiritual motion” found in O’Connor’s work reveal redemption in the suffering of Jesus Christ, while Sartre, at best, finds a sort of consolation in “good” faith and art.