No Exit

“I’m to live without eyelids.”

To live without eyelids means to always be looking and thinking. With two other companions trapped in the same room, it also means being looked at simultaneously. The characters are unable to rest away from the anxiety of being known by others, forming the basis for the room’s hellish tortures.

GARCIN: Frightened! But how ridiculous! Of whom should [torturers] be frightened? Of their victims?

INEZ: Laugh away, but I know what I’m talking about. I’ve often watched my face in the glass.

Garcin’s interaction with Inez foreshadows the dynamic of torturing one another that quickly develops between him, Estelle, and Inez. Inez establishes the importance of mirrors in turning the Look upon oneself.

“I’m looking at you two and thinking that we’re going to live together…. It’s so absurd. I expected to meet old friends, or relatives.”

Estelle, like the others, expected meaning in the structure of her afterlife. The anxiety of discovering there is no plan or essence to existence is a frequent theme of existential philosophy, symbolized here by Estelle wrestling with the absurd nature of the afterlife. The characters will try Creating Meaning in Absurdity, such as when Garcin seeks redemption through Inez’s validation.

“I tell you they’ve thought it all out. Down to the last detail. Nothing was left to chance. This room was all set for us.”

The three protagonists contemplate the idea that an unknown “they” have arranged their afterlife. Each character, when they arrive in the room, expects to find something meaningful and connected to their life on Earth. Without meaning, they are lost and seek to create meaning, latching on to the idea of intentionality on the part of the afterlife’s architects. This idea is never verified throughout the play, yet the characters believe it to be true.

“We’ve had our hour of pleasure, haven’t we? There have been people who burned their lives out for our sakes—and we chuckled over it. So now we have to pay the reckoning.”

Inez categorizes all three of them as “damned souls” paying their dues for life on Earth. As the character who most readily views herself as rotten and cruel, she is the first to suggest this. However, Sartre never confirms the idea of being damned and paying for sins. He uses the character’s tendency to create meaning where none is readily available to demonstrate flaws in the notion of preconceived essences—we are our actions, not our thoughts.

“Also, we mustn’t speak. Not one word. That won’t be difficult; each of us has plenty of material for self-communings. I think I could stay ten thousand years with only my thoughts for company. […] And that way we—we’ll work out our salvation. Looking into ourselves, never raising our heads.”

Garcin makes the case for rationalism. As rational subjects who think and therefore are, like Descartes espouses, Garcin believes it should be easy for them to find salvation internally. Sartre suggests that this outlook is flawed and neglects the importance of the Look and judgments of others.

“But how can I rely upon your taste? Is it the same as my taste? Oh, how sickening it all is, enough to drive one crazy!”

Estelle, deprived of a mirror, is forced to confront Inez’s subjectivity as wholly different and alien to her own. Estelle can never know whether her own impressions align perfectly with Inez’s. Not having control over how her “mirror” views her feels like losing control of herself.

“To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. […] Well, I won’t stand for that, I prefer to choose my hell; I prefer to look you in the eyes and fight it out face to face.”

Inez describes silence as a loud noise to highlight the absurdity of ignoring one another’s presence. The Look doesn’t occur in solely looking, but in the awareness of presence. Inez takes an active role and “chooses [her] hell,” highlighting her role as an existentialist who believes action shapes who she is.

“When I’m alone I flicker out.”

Inez, describes herself as a “live coal” that eats away at others. She likens other people to fuel who feed her. To explain why they need other people, each character uses their own metaphor, where something is compared to something else without “like” or “as.”

“And now supposed we start trying to help each other. […] If you make any movement, if you raise your hand to fan yourself, Estelle and I feel a little tug. Alone, none of us can save himself or herself; we’re linked together inextricably.”

The idea of being linked, trapped, or woven together is a frequent motif in No Exit. This means that each character has to endure the anxiety of the Look because of their need for one another.

If we disagree with the characters’ assessment that their hell is carefully orchestrated, one can argue that Sartre uses the randomness of these strangers sharing an afterlife to highlight how chance shapes everything around us.

“Well, which of you two would dare to call me his glancing stream, his crystal girl? You know too much about me, you know I’m rotten through and through.”

Estelle believes herself to be unlovable due to her actions in life. Her self-descriptions of “glancing stream” and “crystal girl” imply that she reflects the person who loves her.

Estelle also hints at the possibility of allowing Inez to call her such intimate names; these words are not directed just to Garcin.

“Don’t be afraid; I’ll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and you’ll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam. […] Estelle! My glancing stream! My crystal! […] And deep down in my eyes you’ll see yourself just as you want to be.”

Inez claims that the reflection she offers to Estelle is Estelle’s true self. Inez’s adoration is too much for Estelle to handle and frightens her. This loosely parallels the adoration Garcin’s wife feels for him despite his sins and the resulting disgust he feels toward her. Garcin’s wife and Inez both offer a kind of redemption that cause an immense amount of anxiety in the person it is offered to.

“I’ll give you what I can. It doesn’t amount to much. I shan’t love you; I know you too well.”

Garcin has a very pessimistic outlook on love where knowing and loving are mutually exclusive. He isn’t alone in this; Estelle, likewise, is frightened and repulsed by what Inez sees in her. He offers Estelle a charade of love. The short, declarative sentences highlight his character’s bluntness.

“Day and night I paced my cell, from the window to the door, from the door to the window. I pried into my heart, I sleuthed myself like a detective. […] If I face death courageously, I’ll prove I am no coward.”

Garcin spent his final days on Earth in a similar manner to his afterlife. Despite his conviction that his thoughts and intentions will set him at ease and prove he isn’t a coward, he continues to worry after death. Sartre suggests that Garcin can’t resolve his internal sense of self without an objective, validating self; he needs others to observe him as a heroic object in the world. Sartre uses repetition to mimic Garcin’s emotional urgency, repeating “I” throughout the passage.

“Look at me. I want to feel someone looking at me while they’re talking about me on earth…. I like green eyes.”

Earth is categorized as the material world where things happen. People can touch one another, act upon one another. In the afterlife, material anchors are absent. Garcin begs Estelle to look at him while he listens to people talk about him; he needs to simulate the experience of being back on Earth.

“But they won’t forget me, not they! They’ll die, but others will come after them to carry on the legend. I’ve left my fate in their hands.”

Garcin is terrified when he realizes that his objective self, the one constructed by others, has been severed from him and continues living on Earth, without his permission, after he has died. This passage exemplifies the anxiety surrounding the objective self.

“I won’t let myself get bogged in your eyes. You’re soft and slimy. Ugh! Like an octopus. Like a quagmire.”

Three pages earlier, Garcin begged Estelle to look at him. Now her gaze feels inescapable and smothering. The characters vacillate between needing to be looked at and fearing the gaze of others. This exemplifies the anxiety people have when experiencing the Look. Sartre uses similes, where something is compared to something else using “like” or “as.” In this case, Garcin compares Estelle to an octopus and quagmire.

“Open the door! Open, blast you! I’ll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes—all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears—I’ll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.”

Through Garcin, Sartre illustrates how physical torture—"racks and prongs and garrotes”—is nothing compared with the emotional torture of the Look, and of other people.

These lines directly precedes the door opening. Despite wanting to escape one another’s company, none of the characters leave. The protagonists are not consistent in what they want from one another or their surroundings. Through them, Sartre depicts people as inconsistent, which opposes the rationalist assumption that we are by and large consistent in our thoughts and desires.

“You, anyhow, know what it means to be a coward. […] And you know what wickedness is, and shame, and fear. There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn’t know what to make of it, you couldn’t interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs. And when you say I’m a coward, you know from experience what that means.”

Garcin has left behind an objective self on earth that was made by people he no longer respects. In the afterlife, he respects Inez. The only path he sees to quelling his inner turmoil is to convince her that he is not a coward. Garcin, who began the play believing he could find redemption in his own mind, has realized that his tormentor is the only person who can help him.

“For thirty years you dreamt you were a hero, and condoned a thousand petty lapses—because a hero, of course, can do no wrong. An easy method, obviously. Then a day came when you were up against it, the red light of real danger—and you took the train to Mexico.”

Inez consistently applies an existentialist lens to her companions’ actions. Garcin’s vision of himself as a hero is, to the existentialist, a convenient lie to explain away his “lapses,” such as tormenting his wife. One should be judged by their actions, Sartre suggests, not their thoughts.

“I ‘dreamt,’ you say. It was no dream. When I chose the hardest path, I made my choice deliberately. A man is what he wills himself to be.”

Garcin defends himself from Inez by claiming that dedicating himself to a path in his mind is tantamount to actualizing those decisions in the world. This is a purely rationalist point of view and a slightly reworded version of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” that encapsulates much of pre-World War II philosophy.

“Prove it. Prove [being a hero] was no dream. It’s what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one’s made of.”

Just as Garcin succinctly summarizes rationalist philosophy, Inez summarizes the opposing existentialist philosophy. The dialogue between Garcin and Inez is akin to a conversation between the two schools of philosophy. Sartre uses repetition for emphasis, repeating “Prove.”

“You’re a coward, Garcin, because I wish it. I wish it—do you hear?—I wish it. And yet, just look at me, see how weak I am, a mere breath on the air, a gaze observing you, a formless thought that thinks you. Ah, they’re open now, those big hands, those coarse, man’s hands! But what do you hope to do? You can’t throttle thoughts with hands. So you’ve no choice, you must convince me, and you’re at my mercy.”

Sartre’s use of the afterlife as setting removes the possibility that violence can triumph in an argument. As incorporeal souls, Estelle, Inez, and Garcin are little more than abstract bundles of thoughts talking to one another. Sartre emphasizes the paradoxical strength of the Look. It is not tactile, as inconsequential as a “mere breath,” while also shaping our actions, thoughts, and feelings.