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In No Exit, three characters are doomed to spend an eternity together in a Second Empire drawing room; Sartre’s metaphorical hell. Since Sartre did not believe in an after life, hell in this ordinary drawing room is only used as a vehicle for choice and action. It serves a contradictory purpose in letting the dead characters act as they would in life, but with the restrictions that death imposes, specifically the lack of freedom. Although no time is specified, the action presumably is set around the time that he wrote the play, the mid-1940s. The characters that come to inhabit the room are Joseph Garcin, a war defector; Inez Serrano, a working class Spanish woman, who is slowly revealed to be a lesbian; and Estelle Rigault, a member of the French upper class. As each is brought into the room by a valet, each of them begins to develop an entangled, triangular relationship with the other two. Slowly all three begin to realize that each is the others’ torturer. Each character wants something from the others that the others will not surrender, and thus all three are locked in a stalemate of perpetual torture. Their attempts to persuade the others of their innocence, beauty, likeability, and human worth, all fail. None of the characters will see the others as they want to be seen. In No Exit, the conflicts between the main characters illustrate Sartre’s philosophy that “hell is other people”. Estelle sets an excellent example in her desire to become an object. She attempts to project herself as purely an attractive female body for Garcin to admire and love. In her lifetime she had relied upon those who admired and desired her to maintain her self-image, to affirm her being-in-itself. They, not knowing that she had murdered her own baby, had loved her and made her feel worthy. Since they perceived her as pure and clean she could think of herself in that way too and thus redeem her crimes. Once an admirer of hers, a young man named Peter, becomes aware of her abominable act, she needs someone else to support her distorted view of herself.
Approximate Word count = 1370
Approximate Pages = 5.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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