Customer Reviews

No Exit and Three Other Plays (Vintage International)

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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)

No Exit is a tautly written that works on both the dramatic and philosophical levels. With only one act, four characters, and no set other than a sofa and chairs, this play takes minimalism to its extreme. The tension is palpable throughout. Sartre creates a perfectly unworkable triangle of personalities in Garcin, Inez, and Estelle, and within this triangle the dramatic tension steadily builds.

The real beauty of this play is that its message can be interpreted in many different ways. It's not entirely clear what Sartre is trying to say about human nature here. I've heard some people argue that the main point is that the company of other people can be a form of hell. I think this is way to simplistic. If anything, Sartre might be trying to say that hell is a self-fulfilling prophecy - that these people, realizing that they were in hell, created among themselves a set of circumstances that was hellish. The logical converse of that idea would therefore be that by exercising their free will, they could have chosen otherwise. Then there is also the interesting question of why these people are in hell in the first place. Here Sartre makes a strong argument that people have a moral responsibility to act in the best interest of humanity as a whole - something that none of these characters can claim to have done.

While existentialism as a movement has long since been abandoned by most philosophers, this play has lived on, and rightly so. It's well worth the hour that it takes to read it.

No Exit and The Other Plays is, in my humble opinion, the greatest collection of plays I have ever read, restoring my enjoyment of them after high school ruined it by shoving Shakspere down my throat. Sartre is able to convey great imagery and story lines through his writing, and it makes for a gripping read. Out of these, I would recommend Dirty Hands as the best, but all of them are an essential read.

Okay, let me start with mentioning that this book is worth of few hours. Turn off the TV and read it.
Sartre's existentialism is best expressed in his fictions including this one, at least I think.
His persuation to nothingness is not quite expressible without phenomenological settings. And here they are.
I'm having hard time to interest myself by reading Being and Nothingness, but this book is fun to read and easier to capture by sense, not even getting to literal understanding of existentialism.
For those of whom not interested in Philosophy, this book still is to read. It's a well written persuasive book which doesn't seem spoiled by translation. If it doesn't bring us original intention of Sartre, the translator was as brilliant as the author. So read it.

To hold to a view of hell as being in a room without mirrors forever can be characterized as an excess of narcissm. The characters in this play are all cursed with this (rare) affliction, born as it is from total lack of self-confidence. When one of them, Estelle, cannot see herself, she doubts her existence. This (characteristically European) existential insecurity is remedied in the short term by patting herself, but a mirror is ultimately what is needed to set her mind at ease. But these optical guarantees of existence are nowhere to be found. Self-reflection will thus have to take place in consciousness only: definitely the severest punishment of all for Garcin, Estelle, and Inez. Their anxiety, their punishment for wrongdoing, their hell, consists of having to depend on others for the interpretation of their appearance, of having to rely upon the taste of others.

Hell of course is in the eye of the beholder, and others might think that being locked in a room with two women forever might actually be more like heaven. The key idea in all visions of hell though is that it lasts eternally, just like heaven. But eternal life in bliss is just as bad, perhaps more so, than eternal life in hell. After all, in heaven one can put off goals for as long as one wants. Time constraints become meaningless. All one need do is to perhaps think about what one can do, and of course, the goals will always be successful (one cannot be frustrated in heaven).

To find hell in other people, as Garcin did, might make his sojourn with Inez and Estelle much more palatable. After all, he has an infinite amount of time to adjust. His narcissm might have a short decay time compared to infinity. Estelle might get creative and invent a mirror: unending time permits much innovation, regardless of its boredom. Inez might eventually be successful in her advances towards Estelle: Inez has plenty of time for seduction.

It might be very difficult to be optimistic facing the prospect of eternal life as these characters do in the play. The certainty of existence is painful: to be happy one needs uncertainty, or rather, the possibility of failure. But of course one could find a way to embrace this prospect of eternal life. Imagination and creativity would find the answers. An optimistic individual, i.e. an individual not engaging in a self-reflecting narcisstic excess of introspection would, paraphrasing Garcin's last line in the play, get on with it.

In my opinion, Sartre's best works. Your knowledge on theatre is seriously limited without reading No Exit. Sartre's writing style is definitely engaging and the dialogues keep you going till the very last page, which often leaves you thinking deeply. I really enjoyed reading 'The Flies' because of the imaginitive and conclusive characters. It WILL set you thinking!!

I like No Exit, but it's a pity that it takes top billing in this collection. It is not as enjoyable as The Flies, not as intellectually stimulating as Dirty Hands, and not as intense as The Respectful Prostitute.

It isn't surprising that this is the play most often associated with Sartre. The other three are definitely fixed in time and place, even though the themes are universal (is that how that cliché goes?) The existentialist tackles the afterlife, emasculates the popular conceptions of hell, creating the most difficult situation a Situationist could envision. The most quotable line (Hell is other people) is ill-conceived though, isn't it? If hell is other people, than life on earth is hell to an infinitely higher degree. Or is that the point? As for me, I can hardly feel sympathy for Garcin. I can imagine far worse hells than sharing a room with two ostensibly attractive women. And Sartre sends a mixed message. The three occupants slowly lose sight of the world of the living. This is isolation. But they will never lose sight of their roommates. This is companionship. Is he mocking the Holy Trinity, or the concept of a threesome? Funny how these Frenchmen are fixated on the ménage a trois, but I'll take Rene Girard's conceptions over Sartre's.

Individuals placed in difficult situations, and the reader can't help but wonder how he or she would fare in the character's place. You don't need to be an existentialist to craft such fiction, and I think it unfortunate that Sartre's plays are pigeon-holed as part of a philosophical movement. This is great literature, no more or less modern because of an -ism, and will remain great literature when the intellectual pendulum sways away from the stagnant leftist swamp in which it (the pendulum) is caught. So he tweaks the noses of conservative theologians. A shame if that's the only attraction of this collection.

A common thread in these four plays is modestly liberated sexuality. If only the libertine playwrights of today had the taste to follow suit. Yes Inez is a lesbian who hits on Estelle. It isn't a cutesy lollipop flirtation ala Mrs. Dalloway, but it is definitely concrete and vital to the plot of the play. And it only goes as far as it needs to and doesn't overwhelm the play. In Dirty Hands, Hugo's love for Hoederer can either be homoerotic or Platonic (there's a difference...right?) Take your pick, the play works just fine either way. I thought Orestes and Electra got a bit too close at times during The Flies, but this is Greek drama after all. And it was very refreshing to see a twist of the man as sexual beast theme in the Respectful Prostitute. The sexual animal is not the black male, but the white male; in fact the black male is portrayed as impotent. Or that's how I see it. The embrace between Lizzie and "the Negro" is out of Little Women.

I read the four plays consecutively, and expected a let down after No Exit (which I enjoyed, but didn't consider to be anywhere near brilliant). Boy was I wrong. The Flies is laugh-out-loud funny. Sartre rubs our noses in the over-the-top repentance. In fact everything about the play is over-the-top, from Zeus' pettiness to the Orestes' embracing of heroic suffering servitude. If No Exit is a kick in the shin of Christian theology, the Flies is a lead pipe to the kneecap of Greek mythology. Zeus' diatribe to Orestes in Act III is akin to the berating that Job receives in the book that bears his name. I would argue that a connection between Greek sackcloth and ashes repentance to Christian sackcloth and ashes is a tenuous one at best. Incarnate Zeus is light years away from Jesus.

Dirty Hands blew me away. You could call this a tragedy, except Hugo truly does "do" something at the end of the play, and what he does is real and meaningful and senseless all at the same time. Does he do it out of love for Hoederer, despair for himself, to prove a point to Olga? The situation, as Sartre presents it, is inevitable. If the alliance of parties was inevitable, than every other situation of the play was also inevitable. But it isn't the situations that make the play, but the characters. A truly situationist play, with the situation as the all-powerful force, would have nameless characters without dialogue going through motions and putting audiences to sleep. Characters don't just search for meaning, they ARE meaning. This should transfer into real life as well. I'm often amused when characters in plays talk about chance. The irony is that in a play, absolutely nothing is chance. Every situation is carefully thought out by the author, calculated for maximal dramatic effect, with all the tight blocking we've come to expect from masters of the form. Hugo's intellect credits his action to chance, yet just by thinking he is conquering chance because chance is thoughtless. And if thinking is pure chance than you might as well stop reading books and go back to your GameCube or GameBox or whatever the heck they are called.

The Respectful Prostitute is a great change of pace, short and brutally severe. It also proves that the French have always been morally superior to Americans. Viva la revolucion!

I say that because in these four plays one can really get the flavor of Existentialist writing and thought. Each play has its own themes nuances, and each is easily short enough to read through and digest in one sitting. DO NOT barrel your way through it! Take the time to think about each play and how you might feel if in the same situation. Two thumbs up.

The way I would rate the play No Exit is with two thumbs up. There are some key points about this play that make it most interesting for me. One is the overall mystery of death, secondly is the many endless theories about the after life: whether or not it is "Heaven" or "Hell". Also the entire plot of this play made it chilling that you wanted to turn to the next page but unsure of what might be on the other side. And that is one thing that kept me reading.

Jean-Paul Sartre's opinion of what comes after death is what most of us believe it is. That there is life after death. Most of us know "hell" to be a place where there is a eternity of fiery suffering. But "hell" in No Exit is a different kind of a life long suffering. The characters are suffering by being with people that absolutely hate each other. These characters where very strange because after reading what their lives were like on earth you begin to wonder if this is enough suffering for them. However, I can say that this is the most breathtaking story I've ever read. I found it factual in some parts and enjoyable in other parts. I would highly recommend this to everyone who is interested in reading something that will keep them alive.

In these four plays, Sartre translates some of his ideas into drama, documenting man's reaction to religious or political authority, his struggle to change the status quo, and the absurdity of the self-imposed differences in our social strata.

In "No Exit," Sartre envisions hell not as a fiery, desolate abyss, but as a comfortably furnished hotel room in which three people with clashing personalities must live together for eternity, each one alternately being worked over by the other two.

In "The Flies," Sartre employs Greek mythology in a remonstrance of religious supplication. After years living in exile, Orestes returns to his hometown of Argos to avenge the murder of his father Agamemnon, the former king; in doing so and standing up to Zeus, he frees the townspeople from the enslavement of remorse, which is the tool of the gods.

In the almost noir-ish "Dirty Hands," a young man named Hugo, a sheltered and pampered intellectual, joins a socialist radical political faction with the idea of helping his fellow man. Unwilling to compromise his personal idealism, he finds that his comrades are willing to compromise it for him to serve the party's agenda.

And in "The Respectful Prostitute," the title character is pressured to bear false witness in a criminal trial so that a racist murderer can escape justice.

The plays are expressionistic and maybe a little too obvious in making their points, but they are plotted and structured well and feature some very vividly drawn characters. I'm not yet familiar with Sartre's work, but I felt this book was a good introduction.