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Before Being and Nothingness
Nausea (1938) was written 5 years before Sartre's philosophical work Being and Nothingness (1943), but there's a precursor to the thought here.
"... we find it so difficiult to imagine nothingness. Now I knew. Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing."
Live or recount
"... a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it."
A stunning couple of pages in Nausea in which Sartre suddenly spears the illusion of meaning that we grasp from thin air and try to smother over the yawning abyss of existence. We narrativise existence, construct and impose meaning onto experience - but Sartre recognises we can only do so in retrospect:
"...people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begin at the beginning [...] in fact you have begun at the end."
When we 'recount' our lives, we try to seek out the pinnacles and troughs, the 'annunciations' and 'promises', as though they were events there to be recognised and named, rather than conjured and created retrospectively.
"We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents."
It is a Nietzschean moment, where Sartre manages, as he said was his intention, to follow the consequences of atheism to their conclusion. Without any inherent order to experience, we create our own illusion of order; but examination reveals the futility:
"I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail."