No Exit, first produced one month before D-Day in 1944, was the second of Sartre's many plays. Translated literally, Huis Clos, means "closed doors."

This play represents a tight conflict of characters who need one another and, at the same time, desperately want to get away from one another, yet cannot leave. There is no other modern play that offers such a profound metaphor for the human condition. One would have to go back to Doctor Faustus or The Bacchae to encounter such a metaphor, and in the present day, only Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest can rival No Exit in its existential metaphor of the human condition.

In No Exit, three characters are doomed to spend eternity together in a Second Empire drawing room; Sartre's metaphorical hell. This room is devoid of mirrors, windows and books. There is no means of extinguishing the lights and the characters have even lost their eyelids. They have nothing left but one another and the hell (or heaven) they choose to create.

The three characters who come to inhabit the room are Joseph Garcin, a war defector and wife abuser; 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. Sartre brilliantly gives the characters dual reasons for their eternal damnation: first, each committed abominable acts while alive, and second, and perhaps more importantly, each failed to live his or her life in an authentic manner.

As each character is brought into the room by the valet, each begins to develop an entangled, triangular relationship with the other two. All three slowly come to the realization that each is the others' eternal torturer. Each character wants something from another that the other cannot, or will not, surrender. Thus, all three are doomed to a perpetual stalemate of torture.

Sartre's philosophical tenets in Being and Nothingness (L'Etre et le Neant), are beautifully interwoven into the fabric of No Exit. Through dialogue and action, Sartre transforms his philosophical assertions into dialectic form, pitting Inez against both Garcin and Estelle in an eternal battle of ideologies. The characters come to embody Sartre's tenets, and as they interact, the author's ideas come to life. The tenuous balance the characters face between needing the others to define themselves, and the desire to preserve their own freedom is developed throughout the play, but is never resolved.

No Exit would have been far less meaningful, metaphorically, if the one locked door had not swung open at the end of the play, showing us that the continuation of any state of existence is as much a matter of choice as it is anything else.

The biggest question No Exit seems to leave unanswered is whether the misery we cause one another is meant to be or if it is simply chance and the decisions we make that cause that misery. Furthermore, is there anything we can do about it, or is our nature so constructed so that we have no choice in the matter?

The character of Inez realizes the only positive message in the play when she says, "One always dies too soon--or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are--your life, and nothing else." Inez realizes that we have, in each moment, everything we need to be happy, yet we insist on searching for the things that make us miserable.

With the production of No Exit, Sartre made his paradoxical existentialist philosophy accessible to a much larger audience. More than a "thesis" play, No Exit is both engaging and valuable as a piece of dramatic literature in its own right.

As testament to its lasting message is the fact that it is still produced internationally today. No Exit is an extraordinary play, filled with complexities and philosophical premises that are as relevant today as they were when Sartre first illuminated them.


This Lack of Exit is in the Eyes of the Beholder   September 19, 2001
 36 out of 50 found this review helpful

Judging on literary merits alone, these plays are outstanding. The translation is wonderful. I cannot imagine anyone disliking the read. I am not surprised that Sartre was offered the Noble Prize for Literature (which he declined). His plays are more fun to read than his nonfiction. Sartre introduces and manipulates difficult and important ideas with remarkable facility and poignancy. The substance of the plays is more controversial.
Sartre's characters are inhuman. Some of them are cruel to the point of sadism. It is through them--through his characters' words and actions--that he dismisses human friendship and the need for companionship as a private Hell ("No Exit"); through them he indicts human guilt and social order ("The Flies"); through them he slams his intellectual anger against the troublesome reality that politics is about power and compromise, rather than pure ideas and motives ("Dirty Hands"); and finally, it is through his characters that Sartre flings his indignation at the American South of the early twentieth century, its white people, and its communal atmosphere.

The plays are a product of Europe of the 1940s, and more specifically, of the German-occupied France of World War II. They were written either during, or very soon after, the German occupation. Sartre's attitude is pessimistic. The flavor of the catastrophic defeat and collaboration still clings to the plays. But one cannot get by just upon such pessimism. When Sartre's dark existentialsim, such as we find in these plays, was no longer psychologically satisfying, when the hurt, anger, and frustration subsided--Sartre turned to Marxism, which is a much more optimistic world view. Unlike the existenitailism of these four plays, it offers hope, it gives promises, it instills a sense of community, it does not allow to give up on other human beings. And in Sartre's own ideological shift, one can read a certain psychological and practical inadequacy of the attitude that breathes through the pages of these plays. For in them, Sartre passes the dysfunctional and the cruel for the normal. He offers no alternative except to "become free," to will freedom through one's own actions. What does this mean in practice? I don't know.

If Sartre means that to become free is to become like Orestes who denies guilt and moral obligations, I do not want this kind of freedom. Besides, I think that a society of Oresteses would degenarate into a rule of thugs with big sticks. And this is what Orestes is, in my opinion--a teenage thug with a sword. To think that many young people are trying to go to college for years, work hard and try to improve themselves, suffer setbacks and frustration, when all they have to do is to become Orestes ans say, like he did: "I am doomed to have no other law but mine. For I... am a man, and every man must find out his own way." Very grand indeed! And just as hollow.

I do not think that Hell is other people and, as Sartre undoubtedly wanted to make it commutative, that other people are Hell. Sartre finds the dark and the scandalous in the human condition, imbues his characters with it, forces them on his delicate sensibilities--and then feels he is in Hell. Very exquisite. "Dirty Hands" is also an excellent play that no reviewer here has specifically addressed. It has good insights into the nature of politics and the character of politicians. I just think that Hugo did the wrong thing, when he completed his assignment for the party, and a truly hideous, stupid thing was the one that he did at the very end. Ay, was Sartre trying to hurt himself again through his hero? "The Respectful Prostitute" is a powerful play. But remember that it is much easier to condemn and preach than to address real policy issues. Oh, sure, depict racism in all its brutality from a comfortable university in Paris, drag "Uncle Sam" and American politicians into it, while Americans are dying to liberate your country from the Germans; and, while you are at it, portray white Southerners as underhanded, street-smart brutes, whose purposes in life are limited to sex and grusome killings of black people.

The author of these plays portrays the world and its people from a point of view of a broken and defeated man who once believed in what was good about them--and who still intellectually comprehends that good, if only as symbols and gestures, if not realities--but a bitter man nevertheless, a man who holds something against people, a man who knows resentment. For all their clumsy, stupid, brutal (and, alas, inevitable) ways have violated and scarred his sensitive nature.


not bad, for existentialism   March 11, 1999
 19 out of 28 found this review helpful

I like existentialist writings, because they are almost always thought provoking, but I seldom agree w/ the thoughts or ideas presented. No Exit is of course the famous one. Since I know someone who considers being stuck in a room w/ me to be hell, I guess it is at least partially valid, though I personally would go crazy just as easily stuck in the room alone. I used The Flies for my Senior term paper in high school, comparing it to the classic Oedipus story [it was a contrast of style]. The Flies is Sartre's version of Mourning Becomes Electra. This play explores ideas of guilt, authority, and repentence. I think my favorite of the bunch was the Respectful Prostitute, because it brought to light contrasts between what we expect of people and who they actually are [the prostitute is more honest than the respectable people she finds her self around.] All the plays have the theme of a character trapped in a situation in which they must give in and compromise their beliefs/ standards, or suffer the consequences imposed by those in authority.The characters choices, and their reasons, are quite interesting. This summary merely touches on the ideas in the plays; you must read them to understand the thoughts and ideas of Sartre's philosophy.


A MASTERPIECE SHOULD BE SEEN & EXPERIENCED BY ALL -GENIUS   December 4, 1999
 18 out of 23 found this review helpful

It is apt that the title of the book does not include the names of the other three plays, because 'No Exit' alone is a feast. As such I am embarking on an exciting journey to stage this play in London. I am an actor, and I performed this play whilst studying drama at University with 2 American students, way back in 1982. It is a play about life. For me the overriding message is that he wants to shock his audience out of their complacency. We don't have to perpetuate hell here on earth we can control our own destiny and make a difference. As a result we should learn to love the characters by the end of the play, because they are us. The play is a black comedy/thriller. It's simply stunning. Read It!


Respectful?   September 21, 2000
 12 out of 17 found this review helpful

I have just picked up Sartre's No Exit and Three Other Plays and already I am fascinated. I had heard that his play, "The Respectful Prostitute" was a strong criticism of American racism and wanted to check it out. Skipping to the very end of the book and reading this play first, I came away with feelings of anger, and praise. Anger because I am an African-American and was hurt by its realism, but I also praise the work for its scathing, although subtle and multi-layered (sophisticated) critique of American racism. Textually, the work was extremely easy to read. Embedded in this "easy" text however is some of the most thought provoking material ranging from classical notions solitude and isolation to gender issues that should keep the feminist talking for years to come. For me, the most interesting and thought provoking portion of the text deals with the homoeroticism (not to be confused with "homosexualism") that has always been the singular preoccupation in the white male mind with respect to the black male body. The dramatic utilization and subtle working of this topic would have made Freud proud, and Dr. Francis Welsing say, "I told you so!" A must read for anyone interested in portrayals of American racism in the French imagination or just excellent dramatic work.