No Exit

          Sartre’s No Exit may be the epitome of the modern theatre. If nothing else, it is the rawest example of what we can do and what we want to do on the stage. This play presents a tight conflict of characters who need each other, who desperately want to get away from each other, and who cannot leave. I can’t think of another modern play that offers such a direct metaphor for the human condition and would probably have to go back to Doctor Faustus or The Bacchae for such a metaphor, and in this century, only Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rivals this play and its conditional metaphor. After many readings of this play, I can find few superfluous lines and even fewer flaws as these characters inadvertently pursue the conclusion that they have “no need for red-hot pokers,” leaving only the question of whether we are created to cause each other misery or if we simply choose to do so.
          One of the more interesting notes about their being together is that not one of them doubts that he or she is in Hell upon entering. Possibly the valet could have told them. The only existential clue we see from the valet is when he explains the humor he sees in all the guests’ “sense of human dignity.” This dignity will be trampled as the guests try to hold on to it. Garcin wants to make sure that each character in the room remains polite, while Estelle, still holding to relations of this earth, wants people to cry at her funeral. In the silliest example of our human dignity, Estelle, like many of us, is offended by words, insisting that they euphemistically speak of themselves as the “Absentees” rather than as the dead. She even wants to make sure that Garcin does not take off his coat in her presence. As they start to annoy each other, there is no escape from the annoyance, the “ticklish lack of pain,” as Garcin says about Hell. There are no books, no windows, and no way to shut off the light. The characters have even lost their eyelids. What they have is each other and the Hell they create for themselves.
          This human dignity and a subjective reality allow the characters in this play, and the people in the audience, to be each other’s torturers. When Inez enters, she immediately believes Garcin is the torturer. When asked how she would know a torturer if she saw one, she says that torturers have a look of fear. We know from this that she probably knows that look from experience and that she has felt that fear when she is the torturer. Later, we’re not surprised when she says that she feels the need to be the torturer all the time. Of course, Garcin will discover that she is actually his torturer, but before this revelation, they realize that Estelle is the torturer for Inez. Estelle is horrified by the lack of mirrors, and Inez offers to be her mirror, telling her candidly how beautiful she is and promising to point out any flaws (making me wonder if there is any inspiration in this play for the song “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” by The Velvet Underground and Nico). Since she cannot use a mirror to prove her existence to herself, she relies on Inez’s eyes for her existence. Estelle soon realizes that we cannot control others’ minds, so they cannot be our mirrors the way we want them to be. We cannot control what happens to our image once it passes another person’s eyes. Similarly, Inez realizes that Garcin has stolen her face because he can see it and she can’t. In this way, they (we) are dependent on each other because they (we) really only exist as others see them (us). This dependency leads to the climactic decision Garcin has to make at the end of the play, finally deciding he will not leave through the open door and will not push Inez out because she is the one he must convince of his bravery. In other words, if she sees him as a coward, then he is one. We may, in a subjective sense, create reality, but it doesn’t feel like reality until we get someone else to accept and understand it. Such is the nature of story telling.

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