No Exit and Three Other Plays (Paperback)

by Jean-Paul Sartre (Author) "A drawing-room in Second Empire style..." (more)
Key Phrases: glancing stream, class traitor, New York, Second Empire, Queen Clytemnestra (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
4 plays about an existential portrayal of Hell, the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict and an arresting attack on American racism.

Language Notes
Text: English
Original Language: French

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Product Details

• Paperback: 275 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 23, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679725164
• ISBN-13: 978-0679725169
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #14,149 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

85 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hell Is What We Make It, July 4, 2000

By A Customer

No Exit (Huis Clos), is a one-act, four-character play written by Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, writer, literary critic, social and political activist and leader (with Albert Camus) of the existential movement based in Paris.

No Exit, first produced one month before D-Day in 1944, was the second of Sartre's many plays. Translated literally, Huis Clos, means "closed doors."

This play represents a tight conflict of characters who need one another and, at the same time, desperately want to get away from one another, yet cannot leave. There is no other modern play that offers such a profound metaphor for the human condition. One would have to go back to Doctor Faustus or The Bacchae to encounter such a metaphor, and in the present day, only Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest can rival No Exit in its existential metaphor of the human condition.

In No Exit, three characters are doomed to spend eternity together in a Second Empire drawing room; Sartre's metaphorical hell. This room is devoid of mirrors, windows and books. There is no means of extinguishing the lights and the characters have even lost their eyelids. They have nothing left but one another and the hell (or heaven) they choose to create.

The three characters who come to inhabit the room are Joseph Garcin, a war defector and wife abuser; Inez Serrano, a working-class Spanish woman, who is slowly revealed to be a lesbian; and Estelle Rigault, a member of the French upper class. Sartre brilliantly gives the characters dual reasons for their eternal damnation: first, each committed abominable acts while alive, and second, and perhaps more importantly, each failed to live his or her life in an authentic manner.

As each character is brought into the room by the valet, each begins to develop an entangled, triangular relationship with the other two. All three slowly come to the realization that each is the others' eternal torturer. Each character wants something from another that the other cannot, or will not, surrender. Thus, all three are doomed to a perpetual stalemate of torture.

Sartre's philosophical tenets in Being and Nothingness (L'Etre et le Néant), are beautifully interwoven into the fabric of No Exit. Through dialogue and action, Sartre transforms his philosophical assertions into dialectic form, pitting Inez against both Garcin and Estelle in an eternal battle of ideologies. The characters come to embody Sartre's tenets, and as they interact, the author's ideas come to life. The tenuous balance the characters face between needing the others to define themselves, and the desire to preserve their own freedom is developed throughout the play, but is never resolved.

No Exit would have been far less meaningful, metaphorically, if the one locked door had not swung open at the end of the play, showing us that the continuation of any state of existence is as much a matter of choice as it is anything else.

The biggest question No Exit seems to leave unanswered is whether the misery we cause one another is meant to be or if it is simply chance and the decisions we make that cause that misery. Furthermore, is there anything we can do about it, or is our nature so constructed so that we have no choice in the matter?

The character of Inez realizes the only positive message in the play 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 we have, in each moment, everything we need to be happy, yet we insist on searching for the things that make us miserable.

With the production of No Exit, Sartre made his paradoxical existentialist philosophy accessible to a much larger audience. More than a "thesis" play, No Exit is both engaging and valuable as a piece of dramatic literature in its own right.

As testament to its lasting message is the fact that it is still produced internationally today. No Exit is an extraordinary play, filled with complexities and philosophical premises that are as relevant today as they were when Sartre first illuminated them.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Much Impressed, May 3, 2004

By	Laura Pope (Muncie, IN USA) - See all my reviews

I was a bit skeptical going into this one. The premise of the book is fairly simple: three strangers are locked into a single room with minimal furniture and expected to stay there with one another for all eternity. That's it. No violent overthrow of government, no breaking into an elaborate computer mainframe. So why bother reading? C'mon Sartre, show us some plot.
The amazing thing was, I completely enjoyed this play. I gave it a chance and read it through and was not at all disappointed. Think of it: three strangers walk into a room containing three couches, a mantle, an odd mantle decoration, and a door that won't open, and try to make sense of the whole setup.
The female/male ratio is 2 to 1, leaving Garcin to hold his own against Inez, a trouble-making bisexual, and Estelle, a woman who doesn't believe she can function without the support of a man. They realize that the room is their torture chamber, of sorts, in a long corridor of Hell, and their punishment is to be carried out through--are you ready?--annoying one another.
For fear of giving away the plot, or lack thereof, I'll leave you with this: the book is a must-read, if only to discover for yourself the awesome ability of human beings to torture one another using only their personalities. :o)

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Orestes Please, August 11, 2004

By	Tory "toryofmaine" - See all my reviews

I think everyone who has read this collection for the most part agrees that No Exit is one of the greatest plays written. What seems to receive little attention in the reviews on Amazon is the play the Flies. Sartre's reworking of the greek tragedy lives up to the original. I would suggest to future readers that they read the Orestia et al. and then approach the reworking. Sartre adds to one of the oldest story in the western cannon, and that addition is valuable.