"the cambridge companion to the french novel" places "la nausée" in a tradition of french activism: "following on from malraux, sartre, beauvoir, and camus among others were all able to use the writing of novels as a powerful tool of ideological exploration." although novelists like sartre claim to be in rebellion against the 19th century french novel, "they in fact owe a great deal both to its promotion of the lowly and to its ambiguous or 'poetic' aspects."