DE Weekly: Sartre, Hell, & No Exit
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 30, 2024.
Sartre, Hell, & No Exit
“There’s no more hope–but it’s still ‘before.’ We haven’t yet began to suffer” (Sartre 10). There have been countless memorable depictions of Hell over the millennia, but Jean-Paul Sartre’s unforgettable depiction of Hell in his play No Exit remains one of the best.
What’s so intriguing about Sartre’s depiction of Hell is how terrifying it manages to be without the fire and torture and screams of the damned–and that’s actually the whole point.
If you haven’t read No Exit before, let me catch you up.
Three people die and arrive in Hell, one after another. First Garcin, then Inèz, then Estelle.
They’re all placed in the same room, a small, single room with no bathroom, no bed, no windows, and no mirrors.
There’s a couch for sitting, but no way to turn off the lights. And they no longer have eyelids. Who needs to sleep in Hell, anyway?
The three of them get to talking. They discuss things any person would want to know when they realize they’ve died and gone to Hell.
How did you die? Why are you here? Why is Hell like this and…not like we thought?
In talking with each other, they all realize and eventually admit that they do, in fact, deserve to be there. They’ve all done something worthy of landing them there.
And the more they talk, the more they realize they get on each other’s nerves. Eventually, they realize they’re meant to be each other’s torturers.
Garcin refuses. He says he won’t torture the others, he doesn’t want to. Of course, this doesn’t work.
Rather quickly, the neuroticism among all three characters erupts.
“When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist”, says Estelle (Sartre 19).
“You’re lucky. I’m always conscious of myself–in my mind. Painfully conscious”, says Inèz (Sartre 19).
Inèz later gets angry with Estelle because Estelle can see her, but she can’t look in a mirror and see herself, “Why, you’ve even stolen my face! You know it and I don’t!” (Sartre 23).
Herein lies the philosophy behind the entire story.
In his magnum opus Being and Nothingness, Sartre explained one of the fundamental struggles of “being” through the classic ontological lens. Of course, he Sartre’d it up as only he can.
Sartre coined what he called the “look”. The look is the struggle one feels of being forced to see oneself as an object from the consciousness of another person–the “Other”, as Sartre says.
All it takes to see yourself as an object is the presence of another person. That person sees you according to their worldview, and not yours.
You are forced to reckon with that person’s subjectivity, and are reduced to an object in their eyes. The worst part is you are conscious this is happening.
That’s Hell. That’s why it’s so effective against Garcin, Inèz, and Estelle. And for Sartre, it’s the reality that we live every day.
This culminates in the closing sentence of the play:
“Yes, now’s the moment . . . I understand that I’m in hell . . . all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I’d never have believed it . . . There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is–other people!” (Sartre 45).
L’enfer, c’est les autres. “Hell is other people.”
Perhaps the most famous line of Sartre’s, and one of the most misunderstood.
The point is not that other people are annoying, as nihilistic teenagers would interpret. It’s much more poignant than that.
What makes other people Hell is that we are forced to negotiate our identities with them. What we believe about ourselves as the subjects of our own consciousness faces an immovable object: the Other.
Immediately, our worldview has the potential to be shattered. We become objects to the Other. They can know us better than we know ourselves. And when there are no mirrors to look inward, that is Hell.
Eh bien, continuons…
“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.” (Sartre 43).
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
One of my favorite things is breaking down and sharing my thoughts on the famous existentialist texts like No Exit. If there’s a particular book or story you’d like to see in one of these newsletters, give me a shout and I’ll try to include it.
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