Hell Is Other People: Reading No Exit

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Three strangers are shown into a drawing room with no mirrors, no windows, and a bell that does not work. They expect torture. What they get is each other. Sartre's No Exit stages Hell not as fire and pitchforks but as the unbroken gaze of other people, a gaze none of the three can escape and none can stop needing. Garcin wants to be seen as brave, Inez sees straight through him, and Estelle needs a mirror she cannot have except in another person's eyes. Each depends on the others for the self-image they cannot grant themselves, and each is exactly the wrong audience for what the others want to hear. The play's most famous line, spoken by Garcin near the end, is often quoted as a verdict on other people in general: 'Hell is other people.' Read against Sartre's own philosophical writing of the same period, the line says something narrower and stranger: hell is not other people as such, but the trap of depending on another person's freedom to fix who you are, when that freedom can never be relied on to cooperate. The door in the play, notably, is never locked.