In a famous episode towards the end of Sartre's novel, La Nausée [Nausea], the protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, finds temporary solace in the familiar melody of an old ragtime tune, ‘Some of these Days’. The tune he is listening to appears a number of times throughout the philosophical novel and is, he imagines, sung by ‘une Négresse’ [‘a Negress’]– though the song is strongly associated with (and is thus likely the recording by) Sophie Tucker, a Jewish Ukrainian-born American vaudeville and blackface songstress best known as the ‘last of the red-hot mamas’. For Sartre, via Roquentin, music not only seems to offer respite from the nauseating malaise that guides much of the book– that of Roquentin's ‘inability’ as Carroll describes, ‘to distinguish his conscious self from the objects around him’– but also seems to bypass the ontological duality laid out in Sartre's distinction between the mundane physicality of être-en-soi [being-in-itself] and the distinctly human freedom described as être-pour-soi [being-for-itself]Though, as sonorous artefact– let us not forget that Roquentin, as always, is listening to the song on the café gramophone– we might be inclined to think of ‘it’ ontologically as en-soi, it is very clear that for Roquentin the ‘identity’ of the tune is other than the physical or material props that (re)produce the ‘vibrations de l’air qui la dévoilent’ [‘vibrations in the air which unveil it’]. Indeed, it is not even the vibrations, but rather the vibrations merely reveal or ‘unveil’ it.