Huis clos Reading Order

Huis clos (No Exit, 1944) by Jean-Paul Sartre is a one-act play in which three recently dead characters — Garcin, a deserter and journalist; Inès, a cruel and self-aware postal worker; and Estelle, a vain and murderous socialite — are confined together for eternity in a Second Empire drawing room that is Sartre's conception of hell. There is no torturer, no fire, no physical punishment: just the three of them, unable to sleep, unable to close their eyes, unable to die, needing each other and unable to tolerate each other. Garcin needs Estelle's admiration to reassure himself that he was not, in fact, a coward; Estelle needs a man's desire to feel she exists; Inès sees through both of them and torments them with clear-eyed descriptions of exactly what they are. The play's most famous line — 'L'enfer, c'est les autres' (Hell is other people) — is spoken by Garcin near the end: he has come to understand that what makes his eternity unbearable is not physical pain but the fact that the others see him, judge him, and that he cannot escape their gaze or refuse their perception of him. The play is a precise theatrical demonstration of Sartre's philosophical argument that consciousness is always a gaze that turns others into objects — and that being looked at turns the self into an object in turn.