No Exit

No Exit (Huis clos, literally “In Camera” or “Closed Doors”), first performed in Paris at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944, a few weeks before the Liberation, is Jean-Paul Sartre‘s most famous play and the clearest dramatisation of his philosophy. It takes place in a single room, furnished in the style of the Second Empire, with three sofas, a bronze statue on a mantelpiece and a bell-push that does not work; there is no window and no mirror, and the lights never go out. The setting is Hell. A Valet brings in the first arrival, Joseph Garcin, a journalist from Rio, and leaves him; Garcin, who had expected a torture chamber with racks and pincers, is dismayed to find a drawing-room. Presently the Valet brings Inès Serrano, a postal clerk, hard-eyed and mocking; and then Estelle Rigault, a vain young woman from Paris society, with an elegant dress and a nervous manner. The Valet explains that the room has no windows, no mirrors, no toothbrush, no night — “life without respite” — and that no one will ever sleep, or even blink. When Garcin asks who will torture them, he is told that he will find out.

At first the three try to behave decently. Garcin suggests that each sit quietly in his corner and ignore the others, and each introduce himself: he will not even speak. But silence is impossible, since each cannot help watching the others. Estelle, who cannot see herself without a mirror, begs for one; Inès offers to be her mirror, and Estelle, flattered by Inès’s attention, begins to flirt with her; Garcin, to whom Estelle wants to speak, finds that he is under the eye of both. The three begin to tell what brought them here. Garcin, the pacifist editor, refused to fight in the war and was shot as a deserter; but, he says, he will be remembered as a hero, since he died for his convictions. Estelle, who married an old man for money, took a lover, had his child, and drowned the baby in a lake before his eyes, leading her lover to shoot himself. Inès, a lesbian, seduced her cousin’s wife Florence, whom she tormented until the husband, in remorse, was killed by a tram; Florence then turned on the gas and killed them both. Each has been damned for acts in life, but none admits the full meaning of what they did.

The play is the interplay of their desires. Inès desires Estelle and is jealous of Garcin; Estelle desires Garcin and tries to seduce him, though he is impotent to respond with Inès watching; Garcin desires from Inès the one thing he cannot get: a confirmation that he is not a coward. “I want to be rid of my coward’s body,” he tells her; he wants to be told he is a hero; but Inès, who sees through his bad faith, will not give it. “You are a coward, Garcin, because I want you to be.” Garcin discovers that to others he is what he did: “A man is what he wills himself to be.” He did not act as a hero, therefore he is not one; he has no more acts to perform, no chance to redeem himself; his life is closed, and the only judges are the living, who can talk of him as they please, and the two other damned. He turns to listen to news from the earth, where his colleagues at the newspaper are indeed calling him a coward, and the wife he left is asleep — a sign, by the end of the evening, of the fading link. Estelle, whose beauty needs the look of others to exist, begs Garcin to say that he loves her; he refuses to answer since he is staring at Inès. Eventually Estelle takes a paper-knife and tries to stab Inès, who laughs: “You’re forgetting that we’re dead. Killing is only possible in life.”

In the final moments, the door suddenly opens. Garcin, who has said again and again that he longs to escape, hammered against it and demanded that it be opened, now has the chance to leave. But he does not go. He cannot go out into the corridor because Inès, who has seen his cowardice, would mock him, and he cannot leave her with the conviction that he is a coward unconvinced. Nor will Inès nor Estelle go: they too are caught, each by the other’s gaze. “Well, well, let’s get on with it…” concludes Garcin, in the closing speech: “So this is Hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl’. Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is — other people!” (L’enfer, c’est les autres!). The three sit down on their sofas, the laughter rings through the room, and the play ends with the characters condemned to look at each other forever.

The phrase “Hell is other people” is the most misunderstood line in Sartre’s work. It does not mean that other people are intrinsically hateful. Sartre explained in a later interview: “I wanted to show that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other can only be hell. Why? Because others are basically the most important means we have in ourselves for our own knowledge of ourselves. When we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, basically we use the knowledge of us which others already have. We judge ourselves with the means that others have, and have given us, for judging ourselves.” Hell here is the state of dependence on the judgement of others, in the absence of any act that can redefine us. In the language of Being and Nothingness, it is the Look: the experience of being an object for another’s freedom, fixed in a character not of our choosing. In life we can always escape the Look by acting, by changing, by choosing; Hell is death, in which our life is complete and others judge it. This is why the dead cannot escape: their being is fixed, and the characters, who tried to avoid responsibility in life by self-deception (Garcin’s heroism, Estelle’s beauty, Inès’s cruelty), cannot avoid it now. They are in bad faith to the end.

The play was written in the winter of 1943–44 for a group of friends, Camus among them, who was at first meant to direct it; it was first staged by Raymond Rouleau with Michel Vitold as Garcin, Tania Balachova as Inès and Gaby Sylvia as Estelle. Because of the Occupation, it ran under German censorship and was seen by German officers; it was a great success. It has been performed all over the world and translated into dozens of languages; its sets have ranged from a modest drawing-room to a hotel lobby. With its classical unity of time, place and action, its claustrophobic tension, and its lucid, epigrammatic dialogue, it is one of the finest examples of philosophical theatre.

In conversation

• “Hell is other people” — the Look, with no escape.
• The door that opens — and the characters who do not leave.
• Garcin’s cowardice — a man is the sum of his acts.