NO EXIT
Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit was first performed at the Vieux-Colombier in May 1944, just before the liberation of
This play, an example of expert craftmanship
so organized that the audience learns very slowly the facts concerning the
three characters, is Sartre's indictment of the social comedy and the false
role that each man plays in it. The most famous utterance in the play,
made by Garcin, when he says that hell is other
people, l'enfer, c'est
les autres, is, in the briefest form possible,
Sartre's definition of man's fundamental sin. When the picture a man has of
himself is provided by those who see him, in the distorted image of himself
that they give back to him, he has rejected what the philosopher has called
reality. He has, moreover, rejected the possibility of projecting himself into
his future and existing in the fullest sense. In social situations we play a
part that is not ourself. If we passively become that
part, we are thereby avoiding the important decisions and choices by which
personality should be formed.
After confessing her sins to Garcin, Inès acknowledges her evil and concludes with a statement
as significant as Garcin's definition of hell. She
needs the suffering of others in order to exist. (Moi,
je suis
méchante: ça veut dire que j'ai
besoin de la souffrance des
autres pour exister. . . .)
The game a man plays in society, in being such and such a character, is
pernicious in that he becomes caught in it. L'homme
s'englue is a favorite expression of Sartre. The
viscosity (viscosité) of such a social
character is the strong metaphor by which Sartre depicts this capital sin and
which will end by making it impossible for man to choose himself, to invent
himself freely. The drawing-room scene in hell, where there is no executioner
because each character tortures the other two, has the eeriness of a Gothic
tale, the frustration of sexuality, the pedagogy of existentialist morality.
The least guilty of the three seems to be Garcin, and
he suffers the most under the relentless intellectualizing and even
philosophizing of Inès. At the end of the play, Garcin complains of dying too early. He did not have time
to make his own acts. (Je suis mort trop tôt.
On ne m'a pas laissé le temps de faire mes actes.) Inès counters this (she has an answer to everything, Garcin is going to say) with the full Sartrean
proclamation: "You are nothing else but your life." (Tu n'es rien d'autre que
ta vie. . . .)
No further argument seems possible after this sentence, and the play ends
three pages later when the full knowledge of their fate enters the
consciousness of the three characters and Garcin
speaks the curtain line: Eh bien, continuous. . .
. ("Well, well, let's get on with it. . . ."). This ultimate line
which, paradoxically, announces the continuation of the same play, was to be
echoed ten years later in the concluding line of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The two plays bear many resemblances both
structurally and philosophically.