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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• No Exit

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

• No Exit

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