Meursault, Roquentin and the Man Who Sleeps: Three Ways of Saying No to the World

April 30, 2026 by Mylene in Discover

This month in our book club, we immersed ourselves in A Man Asleep by Georges Perec. This short, hypnotic novel—both funny and chilling—led us back to other iconic figures in French literature. Perec himself seems to be in dialogue with two great “dropouts” who came before him: Meursault, Camus’s indifferent man, and Roquentin, Sartre’s man of nausea.

It was this invisible thread connecting these three characters that inspired me to write this article. They have no grand project, no cause to defend, and above all, no desire to have one.

• One buries his mother without shedding a tear and kills a man because the sun blinds him (Meursault).
• Another vomits at the sheer existence of things (Roquentin).
• The third decides, on an ordinary morning, to stop doing anything at all (A Man Asleep).

Meursault (The Stranger by Albert Camus, 1942), Antoine Roquentin (Nausea by Jean-Paul Saryre, 1938), and the Man Who Sleeps by Georges Perec (1967) form a discreet but powerful trinity. They are neither flamboyant rebels nor tragic heroes. They are the great resigners of 20th-century French literature: those who refuse the social comedy, the obligation to find meaning, and the injunction to exist fully.

Roquentin: Nausea in the Face of Raw Existence

Antoine Roquentin is a studious historian working on the biography of an 18th-century marquis. One day, for no apparent reason, the world becomes unbearable to him. Objects, people, even his own body lose their familiarity. Everything becomes contingent, absurd, de trop—superfluous.

“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs its life out of weakness, and dies by chance.”

La nausée, Jean-Paul Sartre

The famous scene with the chestnut tree root remains one of the most powerful in existentialist literature: a banal object suddenly reveals the radical absurdity of being. Roquentin can no longer find meaning in anything. The nausea is not a psychological metaphor; it is an ontological experience. Faced with this revelation, there is neither revolt nor suicide—just lucid disgust. At the end, he glimpses a fragile way out: to write a novel that might give a little necessity to his contingent life.

Roquentin embodies the intellectual who understands too much. His lucidity makes him ill.

Meursault: Indifference as Truth

Meursault is even more radical. A clerical worker in Algiers, he lives in the present moment, without projects, without regrets, without social lies. His mother’s death leaves him almost indifferent. He kills an Arab on a beach almost by reflex, because the sun is beating down too hard. At his trial, he is not really judged for the murder, but for not having cried at the funeral.

“Today, maman died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

L’étranger, Albert Camus

This opening sentence immediately sets the tone. Meursault refuses to play the game. He rejects the comedy of expected emotions, obligatory regrets, and religious consolations. Even facing the guillotine, he remains faithful to his truth: the world is absurd, and there is no point in pretending.

Where Roquentin suffers from contingency, Meursault accepts it with a kind of brutal, almost joyful serenity.

The Man Who Sleeps: Total Withdrawal

With Georges Perec, refusal becomes action. The nameless protagonist (known only through the hypnotic “you” of the narration) is a 25-year-old student who decides one day to stop everything. He sleeps a great deal (or tries to), wanders around Paris, frequents cinemas, cafés, and libraries with no purpose. He no longer studies, no longer succeeds, no longer desires anything.

“You no longer do anything. You no longer look for anything. You no longer ask yourself questions.”

Un homme qui dort, Georges Perec

The constant use of “you” creates a strange effect: both a command one gives oneself and a clinical distance. Perec describes with surgical precision this life reduced to empty gestures, lists of things done or not done.

The Man Who Sleeps does not suffer like Roquentin, nor does he kill like Meursault. He voluntarily disappears from the social game.

It is the most accomplished form of refusal: inertia as resistance.

“How many model stories exalt your greatness, your suffering! How many Robinsons, Roquentins, Meursaults, Leverkühns! Good grades, beautiful images, lies: none of it is true. You have learned nothing, you would not know how to bear witness.”

Un homme qui dort, Georges Perec

Why They Still Speak to Us So Powerfully in 2026

In an era that turns rest into an opportunity for “self-development” and slowness into productivity, these three anti-heroes feel almost subversive. Perec, Sartre, and Camus do not glorify their passivity. They show it in all its ambiguity: both liberation and a refined form of defeat. But above all, they offer us something precious: the right not to be a hero.