A self-proclaimed sadist, Inez is one tough cookie. She believes that each person should be out Estelle Rigault is a young society woman from Paris.
Orphaned as a teen, she married a rich older She's "a born martyr," according to Garcin. She dies shortly after she gets the news about her Garcin is very He claims to have been shot on the grounds of being a pacifist, but his dread of his own cowardice eats away at him throughout the play. He had a wife whom he treated like a dog: he would often stumble home drunk after a long night of womanizing, and once even brought a "half-caste" girl into his home as a sort of mistress.
He was arrested while trying to flee the country after the war broke out, and was executed by a firing squad. A beautiful Parisian lady, Estelle was married to a man many years older than she.
Her lover tried to convince her to leave her husband, but he was poor and she would not comply. When she became pregnant with his child, she went with him to Switzerland and secretly gave birth there. In an act of vicious spite, she drowned the baby in the lake before her lover's eyes. As a result, he shot himself. He is disgusted and struggles to open the door of the drawing room in which they are stuck. In some of the most chilling lines of the play, he cries out for help, for mercy, for freedom:.
Open the door! Open, blast you! I'll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes - all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears - I'll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough. Now will you open? Suddenly, the door swings open. And yet, at the moment when escape is finally possible, Garcin cannot move.
He stays in place. Estelle suggests he and she push Inez out. Inez pleads to stay in the room, and Garcin explains that it is because of her that he too wishes to stay. She is the one he must convince, the one who best knows human cruelty, human weakness, the one who can see through him, and therefore the one whose judgment he most cares about. The characters are essentially immobile - confined to hell by their own choosing. Inez, however, refuses to bend to Garcin. When he argues that he cannot be a coward, that he simply died too soon, she answers: "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. In a rage, Estelle stabs Inez with a paper knife. Of course, it is no use. The characters recognize that they are dead and doomed to stay together "for ever, and ever, and ever.
No Exit offers a distillation of Sartre's existentialism in Inez's famous line: "You are - your life," she says, "and nothing else. It has happened already, do you understand? Once and for all. So here we are, forever. If death is what follows life, where precisely is the line at which one ends and the other begins?
Estelle notes, in defense of her refusal to use the word "dead," that she has rarely felt as "alive" as she does now. Presenting herself as an "absentee" instead, she suggests that what the audience is watching is itself an absence. Much like the frame of an empty image, Sartre's play provides the stage for characters who, in a manner of speaking, simply do not exist.
Time and again, Garcin, Estelle, and Inez strive to reach out to the world of the living - the world they have left behind. Estelle observes Olga and Peter in disgust, while Garcin describes Gomez destroying his reputation before his helpless eyes.
At a certain moment, however, the link between each character and his or her former world dissolves; the "curtain" falls. I can't see anything, but I hear them whispering, whispering.
Is he going to make love to her on my bed? What's that she said? That it's noon and the sun is shining? I must be going blind. Blacked out. I can't see or hear a thing. So I'm done with the earth, it seems. Significantly, her words are all we have to share her experience; the ineffable is rendered through text, but that text in turn points to a structuring absence.
That is to say, due to the confines of the stage, we remain locked in the Second Empire drawing room, unable to see what the characters claim they see; those images of the world flutter before the characters' eyes like celluloid projected on a screen, but the totality of the image, as well as the sounds the characters hear, are reduced to textual components.
When the text is forced to describe nothing, it must resort to typical denotations of absence: silence, blackness, dark. The void, like death, is unfathomable, and cannot be represented through language.
We feel this inadequacy in Sartre's language, and it is a deliberate move on the author's part. In a brilliant subversion of theatrical technique, Sartre takes the convention of the offstage action or event a feature of all ancient Greek drama, for example, in which any death had to occur offstage and was communicated to the audience through a character's account of the event and uses it to give "presence" to what is absent. Estelle, Garcin, and Inez are themselves spectators. We watch them as they watch that which we cannot see.
Christian Metz's theory of the imaginary mirror, though usually applied to the screen, can here describe the stage-based construct Sartre establishes, whereby one "world" is reflected and refracted via another. They've turned down the lights, as they do for a tango.
Why are they playing so softly? Louder, please. I can't hear. It's so far away, so far away. I-I can't hear a sound. Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Edition on No Exit can help. Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. When Garcin dies and goes to hell, he has visions of Gomez and his other coworkers as they sit in the office and discuss the nature of his death, talking about the fact that he was a deserter.
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