Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit presents a tight conflict among characters (Inez, Estelle, and Garcin) who need each other, but who also desperately want an escape. These characters ultimately conclude that they have "no need for red-hot pokers," because humans either are created to cause each other misery or actively choose to do so.
No Exit Plot Summary and Analysis
Almost immediately, the valet makes fun of Garcin’s "sense of human dignity." Garcin wants to make sure that each character in the room remains distantly polite, while Estelle, still holding to living relations on Earth, wants people to cry at her funeral and is offended by Garcin's word choice. She insists that the dead characters euphemistically speak of themselves as the "Absentees." She even wants to make sure that Garcin does not take off his coat in her presence.
This characters' human dignity and subjective reality allow them 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. Inez knows this look from experience.
Of course, Garcin will discover that Inez is actually his torturer, but before this revelation, they realize that Estelle will torture 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 (not unlike The Velvet Underground’s "I’ll Be Your Mirror"). Since she cannot use a mirror to prove her existence to herself, she relies on Inez’s eyes for her existence.
Similarly, Inez realizes that Garcin has stolen her face because he can see it and she can’t. In this way, they are dependent on each other because they really only exist as others see them. This dependency leads to Garcin's climactic decision not to leave through the opened door. He also refuses to 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. Characters may, in a subjective sense, create reality, but it doesn’t feel like reality until they get someone else to accept and understand it.
No Exit's Existential Characters
Despite the play’s title, the play's climax comes when the door swings open at the end. This potential freedom proves to the characters that the ties that bind, are emotional and psychological rather than physical. Although compromise would seem simpler, the characters cannot release their ideals and sense of human dignity.
For example, Estelle believes it is important to love people for whatever they are, or so she says, and believes her love for Garcin should be enough. Garcin must make her love him for a certain reason, i.e. because he is not a coward. Estelle wants to love Garcin despite his being a coward, but that compromise is no consolation to Garcin. Because moralities differ, the communication breaks down, as Estelle’s complimentary message insults Garcin, the receiver.
Much like those trapped in Plato's Cave, the characters in No Exit try to figure out their situation, why they are there, why they are together, and why the room is furnished as it is. The valet seems human in order to support the argument that there can be something left to chance. The idea that the controlling they can make mistakes relies on they to have human fallibility. Still, they have made no mistake putting these three characters together. On the other hand, it is possible that the trio is put here by chance and that any three people put together will cause each other misery.
Inez and Garcin argue over whether this is all planned or if there is anything left to chance. Estelle adds a third argument that supports Camus' fears in “The Absurd Man” when she says, "Anyhow, isn’t it better to think we got here by mistake?" In many ways, this play (and possibly other plays like Shadowbox where “they” control) returns to the ancient mythology where the forces are fallible. If nothing else, it returns to where the characters and possibly the audience believe in this fallibility, making ritual and mythos possible in the modern theatre.
Inez articulates the existential theme 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 humans have in each moment, everything needed to be happy, yet human dignity insists on searching for misery. It may be that, without human dignity, humans are most happy, and Dionysus, with his wine and wilderness, has been right all along.
Jon Blackstock - Blackstock has taught and directed theatre productions for almost twenty years and wishes Suite101 could be typewriter compatible.
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