Reading Order
Huis clos Reading Order
Huis clos (No Exit, 1944) by Jean-Paul Sartre is the most performed and most famous French play of the twentieth century — a one-act in which three dead people are confined in a Second Empire drawing room for eternity and discover that hell is not physical torture but the gaze of the Other. The three characters (Garcin, Inès, Estelle) were each morally compromised in life, and their particular forms of moral compromise make them perfectly suited to torture each other: each one's capacity for self-justification is undermined by exactly what the others need and cannot give. The play demonstrates in theatrical form the central existentialist concepts — bad faith, the gaze, the being-for-others, freedom — that Sartre had developed in L'Être et le Néant (1943) the year before. 'L'enfer, c'est les autres' ('Hell is other people') became one of the most quoted sentences of the postwar period, though Sartre spent considerable time explaining that this did not mean that other people are always hell, only that our dependence on their gaze for self-definition is a form of enslavement.
Where to start
Huis clos can be read in under two hours and is the most accessible entry point into Sartre's existentialism for a non-philosophical reader. Read it before or after La Nausée — the play states economically what the novel dramatizes at length. The play is designed for performance and loses something on the page; if possible, see or listen to a performance before reading.
Complete Huis clos Book List
- 1Buy
Huis clos
Jean-Paul Sartre·1944·Start here — under two hours; the most accessible Sartre; best experienced in performance if possible - 2Buy
La Nausée
Jean-Paul Sartre·1938·The companion novel — Roquentin and the nausea of contingency; read alongside or after Huis clos - 3Buy
Les Mouches
Jean-Paul Sartre·1943·The Flies — the Orestes play written under the Occupation; the most politically engaged of the early Sartre plays; read after Huis clos - 4Buy
L'Être et le Néant
Jean-Paul Sartre·1943·Being and Nothingness — the philosophical work that Huis clos dramatizes; for readers who want the full theoretical account - 5Buy
Les Mots
Jean-Paul Sartre·1964·The autobiography — Sartre's late self-criticism; reads as a response to the positions dramatized in Huis clos
Huis clos — Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'l'enfer, c'est les autres' mean?
'Hell is other people' does not mean what it is often taken to mean — that other people are simply unpleasant and that we would be better off alone. Sartre's point is more specific: other people's gaze defines us from outside, in a way we cannot control; we are dependent on their perception for our self-image, but their perception is always partial, fixed, and potentially degrading. This dependence — being seen, being judged, being defined by others' gaze — is the hell that Garcin, Inès, and Estelle experience: not physical pain but the impossibility of escaping each other's gaze, the impossibility of being seen as one would like to be seen. Sartre later said the statement meant that our relationships with others can be sources of distortion and hell if they are not based on authentic freedom.
Why is the setting a Second Empire drawing room?
Sartre's choice of a Second Empire (1850s–1870s) drawing room for hell — rather than fire and brimstone — is part of the play's point: hell is not what we imagine, not what we fear, but something we would not recognize as hell until we were in it. The drawing room is comfortable, recognizably bourgeois, furnished with bronzes and a mantelpiece; there is no torture rack, no fire. The comfort of the setting makes the psychological torture more effective by eliminating the excuse of physical suffering: the three characters cannot explain their torment as something done to them from outside; they are doing it to each other. The Second Empire setting also carries a specifically French historical weight — the period of Napoleon III, of bourgeois conformism and bad faith.
Who are Garcin, Inès, and Estelle?
Joseph Garcin is a Brazilian journalist and pacifist who was shot for desertion — but who suspects, and cannot escape the suspicion, that he was a coward. Inès Serrano is a lesbian postal worker who destroyed her lover Florence's marriage and drove Florence to kill them both with gas. Estelle Rigault is a society woman who had an affair, had the child killed, and drove her lover to suicide. The three are matched so precisely that each one undermines the other's self-justification: Garcin needs Inès to believe he is not a coward, but Inès knows he is; Estelle could give Garcin the validation he needs, but Estelle needs a man and Garcin cannot give her what she needs; Inès is the only honest consciousness in the room but has no way of using her honesty.
What is bad faith in Sartre's philosophy?
Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre's term for the attempt to escape the radical freedom of consciousness by pretending to be a thing — to have a fixed, determined nature that absolves one of responsibility for one's choices. A waiter who 'plays at being a waiter' — who acts as if his role fully defines him, as if he has no choice but to be a waiter — is in bad faith. The three characters of Huis clos are all in bad faith: Garcin pretends his cowardice was not really cowardice; Estelle pretends she had no choice about killing the child; Inès is the least in bad faith (she is honest about what she has done) but is also the most damned (she knows she is lost). The play dramatizes bad faith by making it impossible to maintain in the presence of others who see through it.
What is the dramatic structure of Huis clos?
Huis clos is a one-act play with five scenes — essentially a continuous dramatic action lasting about ninety minutes. The structure is unusual: there is no conventional dramatic arc (rising action, climax, resolution) because there is no resolution possible. The play begins with Garcin's arrival in the room, continues with the successive arrivals of Inès and Estelle, and then settles into the triangular dynamic that constitutes the 'eternal' hell. The final moment — when Garcin opens the door (which is no longer locked) and finds he cannot leave, that outside is worse than inside — is the play's equivalent of a resolution: the characters discover that they are not imprisoned but are choosing to stay.
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