No Exit The Hypocrites
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In Sartre’s 90-minute one-act, three people have been struck dead in their prime and sentenced to eternal damnation. A womanizing journalist who hid his cowardice behind pacifist rhetoric when he deserted the army, Joseph Garcin has been executed by a firing squad. Inez Serrano, a lesbian postal clerk who took malicious pleasure in turning people against one another, has been murdered by her lover. And Estelle Rigault—a socialite who married an older man for his money, got pregnant by her boyfriend, drowned her baby, and drove the boyfriend to suicide—succumbed to pneumonia.
These three “absentees,” as Estelle calls them, find themselves in a locked, windowless, mirrorless drawing room decorated in haute-bourgeois style. Their task is to figure out why they’ve been damned and why they’ve been confined with strangers with whom they seem to have nothing in common. There are no demons waiting to torture them for all eternity. These civilized sophisticates are one another’s tormentors, locked in an unbreakable chain of psychosexual frustration. Estelle, who defines herself by her relationships with strong men, teases the weakling Joseph even as she fends off Inez’s unwelcome advances. This is Sartre’s metaphor for hell—which is in turn his metaphor for existence.
