Nausea

The guard of the Bouville library’s reading room, whom Roquentin calls only “the Corsican,” watches over the library’s patrons and materials. Early in the novel, Roquentin notices that the guard seems particularly suspicious of the Self-Taught Man, but when he asks the Self-Taught Man about it at dinner, he deflects. When the guard catches the Self-Taught Man molesting a young male student under a table in the library, the nature of their conflict becomes clear. The guard has seen the Self-Taught Man engaging in inappropriate behavior with children before, but this incident has given him both proof and abundant witnesses. According to Roquentin, the guard likes to think of himself as a protector and taskmaster to the students who visit the library, and as such he takes particularly extreme offense to the Self-Taught Man’s violation. When the Guard begins to beat the Self-Taught Man and Roquentin intervenes, the Guard calls him a “fairy,” a slur for gay men that implies that the Guard’s disgust with the Self-Taught Man is due to the victim’s being not just a child, but a male child.