NO EXIT
Sartre’s three protagonists are damned for not having lived authentically. They never exercised their freedom of choice and gave in to the meaninglessness of contemporary life. Sartre’s poetically just hell is where these newly dead must explore ad nauseam the same dead ends (or “false positions”) that they stumbled into while alive.
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Garcin, Inez, and Estelle–a pacifist journalist, post-office clerk, and snobbish coquette–are led by a sardonic Valet into a room furnished in a hideous Second Empire style. They are strangers, but not for long. In this stuffy chamber there are no windows, no darkness, no need to sleep, and, worst of all, no mirrors. Infernally enough, the inmates must reflect each other.
Though a classic part of modern theater, No Exit is seldom performed. Yet it’s a surprisingly persuasive melodrama; its conflicts may be contrived and forced, but the desperation behind these convenient confessionals is real. Though only 75 minutes long, the play’s claustrophobia is as suffocating as that of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, and its depiction of the hereafter strongly recalls the cemetery scene in Our Town, where earth time rushes by much faster than afterlife time. But only Sartre could ram home the forbidding truth: “One always dies too soon–or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment. . . . You are–your life, and nothing else.”
