No Exit and Three Other Plays

Summary

No Exit and Three Other Plays is an American collection of four of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays from the years of the German occupation and just after it, in which his philosophy of freedom and responsibility is worked out on the stage. Stuart Gilbert translated No Exit and The Flies, and Lionel Abel translated Dirty Hands and The Respectful Prostitute. No Exit (Huis clos, first performed in Paris in May 1944) is a one-act play set in a Second Empire drawing room with a bronze ornament, no windows, no mirrors and lights that never go out. A valet shows in three people who have recently died: Joseph Garcin, a Brazilian journalist and pacifist shot for trying to flee the war; Inez Serrano, a former post office clerk; and Estelle Rigault, a young society woman. Expecting torture, they find only one another. Each at first lies; under Inez's questioning they confess that Garcin treated his wife cruelly, that Inez drew her cousin's wife away from him and died with her when the woman turned on the gas, and that Estelle drowned her newborn child, after which her lover shot himself. Estelle wants Garcin, Garcin wants Inez to believe he is no coward, and Inez desires Estelle. When the door suddenly opens, none of them leaves. Garcin concludes that they need no torturers because each is the others' torment, and the three resign themselves to going on together for ever. The Flies (Les Mouches, 1943), in three acts, retells the myth of Orestes. Argos, ruled by the usurper Aegistheus and Clytemnestra since the murder of Agamemnon, lives in organized public repentance, plagued by flies sent by Zeus. Orestes returns in disguise, meets his sister Electra, kills both rulers, and refuses to repent before Zeus, claiming the act as his own free deed. He leaves the city, drawing the Furies after him. Dirty Hands (Les Mains sales, 1948), in seven scenes, is set in the fictional Balkan state of Illyria near the end of the Second World War. Hugo, a young bourgeois intellectual in the Proletarian Party, is sent with his wife Jessica to serve as secretary to the leader Hoederer, whom the party has decided to kill for negotiating with the Regent and the nationalists. Hugo is won over by Hoederer, yet shoots him on finding Jessica in his arms. Released from prison, he learns the party now follows Hoederer's policy and chooses death over disowning his act. The Respectful Prostitute (La Putain respectueuse, 1946), in one act, is set in a town in the American South. Lizzie MacKay, a newcomer, has witnessed a white man kill a Black man on a train. The killer's cousin Fred and his father, a senator, press her to sign a false statement accusing a second Black man, who comes to her for help as a mob hunts him. She resists, signs, hides him, and ends under Fred's protection. Sartre drew on the Scottsboro case of 1931. The library holds no text; the plays are under copyright.

Plot or Argument

• No Exit (1944)

  Three dead strangers are shut in a windowless drawing room. Stripped of their lies by one another's questioning, they discover that their punishment is to depend for ever on each other's judgment; when the door opens, none can leave.

• The Flies, Act I: Argos in mourning

  Orestes and his tutor arrive in Argos, where flies swarm, the people perform constant penance for Agamemnon's murder, and Zeus, disguised as a traveller, urges Orestes to move on. Orestes meets Electra.

• The Flies, Acts II–III: The deed and the departure

  On the day of the dead Electra defies the ritual; Orestes kills Aegistheus and Clytemnestra. In the temple of Apollo he refuses Zeus's offer of the throne in exchange for repentance, Electra submits, and Orestes walks out of Argos taking the Furies with him.

• Dirty Hands, Scenes 1–3: Hugo's mission

  In 1945 Hugo, just out of prison, comes to Olga and recounts the events of 1943: his assignment as Hoederer's secretary, with secret orders to kill him, and his life in Hoederer's house with Jessica.

• Dirty Hands, Scenes 4–7: Hoederer's death and Hugo's choice

  Hoederer negotiates with the Regent's representative and argues with Hugo about purity and dirty hands. Hugo hesitates, then shoots him when he finds Jessica embracing him. Back in the present, learning that the party has adopted Hoederer's line, Hugo refuses to be salvaged and goes out to the comrades sent to kill him.

• The Respectful Prostitute

  Lizzie, pressed first by Fred and then by his father the senator, who appeals to her pity for a grieving mother and to her patriotism, signs false testimony against a Black man she knows to be innocent, then tries to protect him from the mob, and ends in Fred's keeping.

Characters

• Joseph Garcin, No Exit

  Journalist and self-styled pacifist executed for trying to flee the war, desperate to be thought brave.

• Inez Serrano, No Exit

  Former post office clerk, the most clear-sighted of the three, who knows she is damned and torments the others.

• Estelle Rigault, No Exit

  Society woman who married an older man for money and drowned the child of her lover.

• The valet, No Exit

  Polite attendant who shows each new arrival into the room.

• Orestes, The Flies

  Son of Agamemnon who returns to Argos and kills its rulers, claiming his act as his own free choice.

• Electra, The Flies

  Orestes's sister, who longs for revenge but gives way to remorse after the killing.

• Zeus, The Flies

  King of the gods, who sustains order in Argos through guilt and fear.

• Aegistheus and Clytemnestra, The Flies

  Usurping king and queen of Argos, murderers of Agamemnon.

• Hugo Barine, Dirty Hands

  Young intellectual of bourgeois background in the Proletarian Party, assigned to assassinate Hoederer.

• Hoederer, Dirty Hands

  Experienced party leader willing to compromise with rivals to save lives and gain power.

• Jessica, Dirty Hands

  Hugo's young wife, playful and bored, drawn to Hoederer.

• Lizzie MacKay, The Respectful Prostitute

  Young woman newly arrived in a Southern town, pressured to give false testimony.

Lessons

• Freedom and responsibility

  Sartre held that human beings have no fixed nature given in advance; they exist first and define themselves by their choices, for which they are wholly responsible. Orestes in The Flies embodies this view when he refuses to hand his deed over to Zeus or to repent, and Garcin in No Exit learns that his life is the sum of what he did, not what he dreamed.

  • Why does Orestes refuse Zeus's offer of the throne in exchange for repentance?
  • How does Inez answer Garcin's claim that he died too soon to prove his courage?
  • Are we defined only by our acts, or also by our intentions and hopes?

• Hell is other people, in context

  The most famous line of No Exit is often taken to mean that other people are unbearable. Sartre explained that he meant something narrower: when we depend wholly on the judgment of others to know ourselves, and our relations with them are twisted, the others become our hell. The three characters cannot stop seeking each other's verdicts.

  • What does each of the three characters want from the others?
  • Why do they not leave when the door opens?
  • How much should another person's judgment of us determine who we are?

• Bad faith

  Sartre's term bad faith names the self-deception by which people deny their freedom, treating themselves as victims of circumstance or as fixed characters. Garcin's claim to be a hero, Estelle's insistence that she is a mere child of fortune, and Lizzie's surrender to the senator can all be read through it.

  • What lies does each character in No Exit tell on arrival?
  • How does the senator persuade Lizzie to sign?
  • Is it possible to deceive oneself knowingly?

• Clean hands and dirty hands

  In Dirty Hands Hoederer argues that anyone who acts in politics must accept compromise and the dirt of the world, while Hugo wants a purity of principle that may cost others their lives. Sartre gives both men strong arguments.

  • What does Hoederer mean when he says he has dirty hands?
  • Why does Hugo finally shoot him, and does Hugo himself know?
  • Can a person act in public life without compromising his principles?

Context

Sartre wrote these plays between the German occupation of France and the early Cold War. The Flies, staged in occupied Paris, used Greek myth to speak of freedom and of the official culture of repentance promoted under the Vichy regime. No Exit opened weeks before the liberation of Paris. Dirty Hands drew on the debates of the French Communist Party and the Resistance about political means and ends, and The Respectful Prostitute, written after Sartre's visits to the United States in 1945–46, took up racial violence in the American South through the lens of the Scottsboro case. The plays dramatize the ideas of Being and Nothingness (1943): existence precedes essence, radical freedom, bad faith and the look of the other, which Sartre summed up in his famous line from No Exit, usually rendered hell is other people.

Composition

The Flies opened in June 1943 at the Théâtre de la Cité, directed by Charles Dullin. No Exit was first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944. The Respectful Prostitute opened at the Théâtre Antoine in November 1946 and Dirty Hands at the same theatre in April 1948. Stuart Gilbert's translations of No Exit and The Flies were published by Knopf in 1947, and Lionel Abel's of the other two plays in 1949; Vintage Books gathered all four in one paperback in 1955.

Reception

No Exit became one of the most performed plays of the century and its famous line passed into common speech, often detached from Sartre's meaning; Sartre explained it in a recorded introduction in 1965. The Flies was read after the war as a drama of resistance, though critics disagree about how clearly its first audiences understood it so. Dirty Hands was a popular success but was taken up as anti-communist, and Sartre for some years restricted its performance. The Respectful Prostitute drew protest and debate in both France and the United States, and Sartre altered its ending for later productions and a 1952 film. Christian critics such as Gabriel Marcel engaged Sartre's atheist existentialism seriously, and the plays remain central in teaching his thought.

Comparisons

• the-oresteia

  Aeschylus's Orestes is pursued by the Furies and freed by the court of Athena; Sartre's Orestes refuses any divine verdict and carries his deed alone.

• the-divine-comedy

  Dante's hell is an ordered place of just punishment under God; Sartre's hell is a closed room in which the damned are each other's punishment.

• camus-the-stranger

  Sartre reviewed The Stranger in 1943; both writers set a lonely hero against social judgment, though Camus rejected Sartre's existentialist label for himself.

• the-brothers-karamazov

  In Existentialism Is a Humanism Sartre took as his starting point Ivan Karamazov's claim that if God does not exist everything is permitted; the plays explore what freedom means on that premise.

• to-kill-a-mockingbird

  Both works treat a false accusation against a Black man in the American South of the 1930s; Harper Lee tells the story from inside a Southern town, Sartre from the viewpoint of a French visitor's satire.

• the-sickness-unto-death

  Kierkegaard's analysis of despair as the refusal to be oneself before God is the Christian root of the existentialist tradition that Sartre carried in an atheist direction.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• In No Exit, the room's furnishings, the missing mirrors and the bronze ornament, and the moment the door opens.
• In The Flies, the flies and the ceremony of the dead in Act II, and Orestes's dialogue with Zeus in Act III.
• In Dirty Hands, the frame scenes with Olga and the debate between Hugo and Hoederer.
• In The Respectful Prostitute, the methods the senator uses to persuade Lizzie.
• In each play, the moment a character either accepts or evades responsibility for an act.

Key terms and names

Existence precedes essence

Sartre's principle that human beings have no fixed nature in advance and define themselves through their choices.

Bad faith

Sartre's name for self-deception that denies one's own freedom, as when Garcin insists he is a hero despite his flight.

The look

Sartre's term for the experience of being seen and judged by another person, which fixes us as objects; central to No Exit.

Huis clos

The French title of No Exit, a legal phrase meaning behind closed doors, in camera.

Argos

The Greek city of The Flies, where rulers keep the people in fear through public repentance for an old crime.

Illyria

The invented Balkan country of Dirty Hands, caught between the German army, the Regent's government and the advancing Soviet army.

Scottsboro case

The 1931 Alabama trials of nine young Black men falsely accused by two white women, which gave Sartre the situation of The Respectful Prostitute.

Content note

Recommended for older high school students with guidance: the plays include infanticide, suicide, a same-sex attachment, matricide, assassination, prostitution, and a mob hunting a Black man in the American South, all presented in their historical and dramatic setting.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In No Exit, what had each of the three characters done in life, and how do they first try to hide it?
2. Comprehension In The Flies, why do the people of Argos live in repentance, and what does Orestes do about it?
3. Comprehension In Dirty Hands, what mission is Hugo given, and why does he finally carry it out?
4. Interpretation Why do Garcin, Inez and Estelle stay in the room when the door opens?
5. Interpretation How does the senator in The Respectful Prostitute use Lizzie's feelings to make her sign, and why does she give way?
6. Interpretation Is Orestes's refusal to repent a form of courage, pride, or both?
7. Big Question If there were no God, would human beings be more free, or less?
8. Big Question Do we discover who we are by looking within, by our actions, or through the eyes of others?

Faith Connections

• Genesis 1:26-27 (Scripture)

  Christian teaching holds that human nature is given by a Creator who makes man in His image; Sartre's claim that existence precedes essence is a deliberate denial of this, and the two views make a clear seminar contrast.

• 1 Corinthians 4:3-5 (Scripture)

  Paul says it is a small thing to be judged by men, or even by himself, for the Lord is his judge; the characters of No Exit have no judge but one another.

• Amos 5:21-24 (Scripture)

  God rejects empty festivals and calls for justice to roll down like waters; Argos's ritual penance in The Flies, which keeps the people afraid without making them just, can be read against the prophet.

• C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Great Conversation)

  Lewis pictured the damned as those who choose self over joy, holding that the doors of hell are locked on the inside; his picture and Sartre's room agree that hell is self-chosen while differing over whether God waits outside.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If there is no God to give human beings a nature, then each person is nothing but the sum of his acts and is wholly responsible for them; those who evade this freedom by lying to themselves or by seeking their identity in others' judgment live in bad faith, as the characters of No Exit discover.

Rhetorical device: dramatic irony. In No Exit the audience soon sees, before the characters admit it, that the absence of instruments of torture is itself the torture, and the opening of the door confirms that nothing outside holds them.

Debate: Resolved: that Hoederer's willingness to dirty his hands makes him a better leader than Hugo.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose one character from each of two plays in the collection and argue whether each finally accepts or evades responsibility for what he or she has done.

Comparison with The Oresteia: Compare Aeschylus's and Sartre's Orestes: how does each face the Furies, and what does each ending say about guilt, justice and the gods?

Medical Lens

The plays touch medical matters only through their backstories. In No Exit Estelle died of pneumonia, her lover shot himself after she killed their infant, and Inez's companion turned on the gas, killing them both; Garcin was executed. Psychological readings of the three characters as studies of narcissism, dependency or shame are interpretive; Sartre framed their condition philosophically, as bad faith and dependence on the look of others.

• No Exit

  Estelle's confession of the birth of her child in Switzerland, its drowning from a balcony, and her lover's suicide.

  Childbirth Maternal Suicide
• No Exit

  Inez's account of how her cousin's wife turned on the gas in their room at night.

  Suicide Death Dying
• No Exit

  Estelle mentions dying of pneumonia; each character describes the manner of death.

  Fever Infection Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Explain Sartre's meaning in the famous conclusion of No Exit, using the relationships among Garcin, Inez and Estelle and Sartre's own explanation of the line.

• Classroom

  Stage the scene in Dirty Hands in which Hoederer and Hugo argue about clean and dirty hands, then debate which character has the stronger case.

• Fiction

  Write a short scene in which a fourth person is shown into the room of No Exit, and show how the three receive the newcomer.

Further Reading

• Existentialism Is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre

  Sartre's 1945 lecture setting out existence before essence, freedom and responsibility in plain terms.

• Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre

  The 1943 treatise in which bad faith and the look of the other are analyzed.

• Sartre: A Life, Annie Cohen-Solal

  Biography covering the occupation years and the theatre of the 1940s.

• Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It, Ronald Aronson

  History of the two writers' relationship from 1943 to their break in 1952.