ABSTRACT
If time is central to history, Sartre left the door open in Nausea to a reconsideration of his position on history. For, in his novel, there are hints of what would be his preoccupation with time, five years later, in Being and Nothingness. When Roquentin observes a woman walking down the street, he asks, “do I see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future. . . . This is time, time laid bare.” Later, he learns that his world is “the present, nothing but the present,” that the past was but is not. Only the present is-the present fleeing into the future. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre would explain that it is the For-Itself, human consciousness, which introduces time into the dense, tenseless reality of Being-in-Itself.1
