Unveiling the Abyss: The Profound Depths of Sartre’s “No Exit”

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Three sofas, a bronze ornament on the mantelpiece, a locked door, an unreliable bell and no mirrors: that is the full inventory of the drawing room in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis clos), and it carries an entire play. The furniture is Second Empire in style. The setting is hell, and it contains no fire, no brimstone and no instruments of torture.

The line the play is known for, “Hell is other people,” is usually quoted without the room that produces it. The room matters. Read inside it, the line stops sounding like a complaint about bad company and becomes an argument about judgment and freedom.

The Author and the Play’s History

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905, and died there on April 15, 1980. His novel Nausea appeared in 1938 and his philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness in 1943. He became editor-in-chief of the journal Les Temps modernes, whose first issue came out in October 1945, and in 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and declined it. Simone de Beauvoir was his partner from 1929 until his death.

Huis clos was his second play, after Les Mouches in 1943, and it was written under the German occupation of France. The title is the French equivalent of the legal phrase in camera, a proceeding held behind closed doors, which is why English versions have appeared as In Camera, Vicious Circle and No Way Out as well as No Exit. It opened on May 27, 1944, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, with Michel Vitold as Garcin, Tania Balachova as Inès and Gaby Sylvia as Estelle. Gallimard published the text in 1945. The play runs in one act, divided into five scenes.

Three Second Empire sofas turned away from each other in a bare drawing room

Three People, One Drawing Room

A valet shows each new arrival in. He says little, mocks the lurid stories people tell about hell, and warns that the bell rarely works. Joseph Garcin, a pacifist journalist executed for desertion, comes first. Inès Serrano, a postal clerk whose affair with her cousin’s wife, Florence, ended with both women dead from a gas stove, follows. Estelle Rigault, a society woman who drowned her newborn daughter, arrives last, and her lover shot himself afterward.

Each expects torture, and none comes. Britannica’s summary puts the mechanism plainly: every one of the three needs another person to define them, yet is most drawn to the person likeliest to unsettle them. Garcin, for one, wants to be reassured that he is not a coward.

The confessions are dragged out of them. Estelle describes her funeral and says she cannot think why she is there. Garcin claims he refused to fight on pacifist principles, and later admits he spent most of his marriage cheating on his wife. Inès confesses her affair with Florence. Estelle, last, admits to the baby and the Swiss lake. Near the end the door suddenly opens. Garcin, who had been pulling at it, finds he cannot make himself walk out. Estelle stabs Inès with a paper knife, Inès laughs and reminds her that all three are already dead, and the play closes on a line of Garcin’s that amounts to a shrug:

“Eh bien, continuons…”

(Garcin’s final line, which translates roughly as “Oh well, let’s continue.” Source: Wikipedia, No Exit.)

What “Hell Is Other People” Means

The line is easy to quote and easy to misread. Sartre answered the misreading himself, in an oral preface to a 1964 recording of the play. It did not mean, he said, that our dealings with other people are always poisoned. His point was narrower: when a relationship is twisted, the other person can only be hell, and the twisting comes from handing the verdict on ourselves over entirely to what others think. Relationships remain possible. The line is a measure of how much other people matter to us.

“L’enfer, c’est les autres.”

(Garcin, Huis clos; in English, “Hell is other people.”)

The machinery behind it comes from Being and Nothingness, where Sartre describes “the look.” His example is a man bent at a keyhole, absorbed in what he sees, who hears footsteps behind him and suddenly sees himself as someone else would: an object, caught, ashamed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy treats that jolt of shame as a discovery of being-for-others. The play removes the keyhole and the footsteps and leaves only the watching. With no mirrors in the drawing room, whatever picture the characters hold of themselves has to come from one another.

The second idea is bad faith, Sartre’s term for self-deception about one’s own freedom. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s standard illustration is the café waiter who plays at being a waiter. Garcin’s version is more desperate. He asks the others to certify that he was not a coward, as if a life were settled by testimony. The play keeps declining to grant him that.

Freedom With the Door Open

Sartre’s lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, published in 1946, includes a sentence that sums up the burden at the center of the play:

“man is condemned to be free”

(Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet.)

The play turns that sentence into a stage picture. When the door opens, nothing physically prevents Garcin from leaving. He stays, to prove his courage to Inès, and the lock turns out never to have been the problem. Britannica reads the play as proposing that hell is not a state imposed by God but something people make of one another, and Encyclopædia Universalis ties its concern with choice, guilt and judgment to the Occupation years, when ordinary people were forced to choose and then to live under other people’s eyes.

Paper knife on a velvet sofa cushion beside a small bronze mantel ornament

On Stage and Screen

The English-language premiere took place on Broadway in 1946, at the Biltmore Theatre, in a translation by Paul Bowles. John Huston directed, with Claude Dauphin, Ruth Ford and Annabella in the cast, and the run lasted three weeks. Bowles renamed Garcin “Vincent Cradeau.” London saw the play the same year as Vicious Circle at the Arts Theatre Club, directed by Peter Brook, in a translation by Margery Gerbain and Joan Swinstead.

Jacqueline Audry directed the first film, Huis clos, released on December 22, 1954. Arletty played Inès, Franck Villard played Garcin and Gaby Sylvia, from the original stage cast, played Estelle. The screenplay is credited to Pierre Laroche and Sartre himself, and the film runs 95 minutes.

The BBC’s The Wednesday Play staged the work as In Camera in 1964, directed by Philip Saville, with Harold Pinter as Garcin in Stuart Gilbert’s translation. A copy of that broadcast, as uploaded by the Play For Forever channel on YouTube:

The BBC returned to the play in 1985 with Vicious Circle, in which Omar Sharif played Garcin, and the Comédie-Française broadcast a staging on April 17, 2021. Maurice Béjart even made a ballet from it, Sonate à Trois, in 1977. Across all of these versions the requirements stay the same: three people, a door and someone watching.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Huis clos mean?
Literally “closed door.” It is the French counterpart of the legal term in camera, a proceeding held in private, which is where the English title In Camera comes from.

Who are the three characters?
Joseph Garcin, a pacifist journalist executed for desertion; Inès Serrano, a postal clerk; and Estelle Rigault, a society woman. A valet, called the Boy, Bellman or Waiter in some productions, brings them in.

Where is the play set?
In a drawing room in Second Empire style that stands in for hell. It has no mirrors, a bell that rarely works, and a door that stays locked until close to the end.

Did Sartre explain “Hell is other people”?
Yes. In an oral preface to a 1964 recording of the play, he said the line was misread as meaning that relations with others are always poisoned. In his account, a distorted relationship turns the other person into hell, and the distortion comes from depending wholly on other people’s judgments.

When was it first staged?
On May 27, 1944, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, during the German occupation. Gallimard published it in 1945.

Has it been filmed?
Yes. Jacqueline Audry directed a French film in 1954 with a screenplay co-written by Sartre, and the BBC broadcast television versions in 1964 (In Camera) and 1985 (Vicious Circle).

Closed paneled salon door with a small brass bell and a thread of light beneath

Where to Read It

No Exit: A Play in One Act (affiliate link). The Samuel French paperback of the one-act play, which Open Library lists as a 60-page English edition published in 1958, is the edition linked from the buy button at the top of the page.

Further Reading

Rethinking Existentialism, a research blog from Cardiff University, carries Jonathan Webber’s post “Why Inez Is Not In Hell,” dated December 17, 2015. Webber breaks with the usual reading and proposes that “the play is rather set at the Last Judgment,” then builds his case from there. Anyone who has settled on the standard account will find it a useful test.

1000-Word Philosophy has a short essay on the line, “Hell Is Other People”: Jean-Paul Sartre on Personal Relationships, that sets out Sartre’s 1964 clarification and ties it to bad faith and the account of relations with others in Being and Nothingness. The essay cites a French-language clip of Sartre’s own explanation, titled “Sartre – L’enfer, c’est les autres ‘Explications’” on YouTube.

Sources

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