"NO EXIT"

"No Exit" by Jean Paul Sartre Reading Notes and Answers to Embedded Questions in This Text.

• Estelle, Garcin, and Inez in a room; they discover its the afterlife; can't figure out how they are supposed to be tortured.
• Garcin doesn't care about the girls, Estelle cares about herself, and Inez cares about Estelle.
• No mirrors in the room - characters are left to only themselves through others' perceptions of them (taken literally when Estelle sees her appearance through Inez's eyes as the mirror)
• Garcin deserted the army and was shot twelve times before heading to Mexico.
• Inez's lover had a husband.  The husband was run over by a tram.  The lover turned on the gas at night and killed both her and Inez.
• Estelle drowned her baby after having it with a man besides her husband.  That man killed himself.  She died of pneumonia.
• They are all unhappy about the imprint or lack of imprint of them left on Earth: Garcin is called a coward, Estelle's best friend flirts with a boy who admired Estelle, and Inez's room is let out and moved into by a couple.  
• Tone: darkly humorous
• Irony: In the beginning, the characters explain to one another why they aren't the torturer, but in the end, it is revealed that they are actually all each other's torturers.
• Inez tortured by Estelle and Garcin's relationship, but tortures Garcin with the power of declaring or not declaring that he is a coward.
• Garcin tortured by Inez stating or refusing to state his cowardice, but tortures Inez by being with Estelle.
• Estelle tortured by Garcin not loving on her, but tortures Inez by being with Garcin.

Answers:

1.  The place I have chosen as my hell is ordinary-looking similar to that described of Sartre’s drawing room.  The mind can be in hell in a beautiful place because according to Sartre it is the people that make the place either hell or a blissful escape.  Also, what some people may consider beautiful others may consider hell; it depends upon the perspective.  However, I don’t believe there is a way to find peace in a hellish physical environment without numbing your senses to eliminate sounds, smells, and sights allowing you to have peace of mind.  Living in Sartre’s space endlessly, night and day, would likely be torture.  I may have started out okay, but I fear that I would soon get claustrophobic by my unchanging, constrained surroundings and turn insane, like astronauts are tested for their cabin fever.

2.  I am a supporter of the quote “everything in moderation.”  Too much cheesecake would ruin your health, and diminish the satisfaction each additional time you eat cheesecake.  In economics, it is called the law of diminishing marginal utility.  Every additional time you interact with something that you have interacted with before, you receive less pleasure from the situation because you have already experienced it so the novelty has worn off.

3.  Sartre creates a sense of the setting through dialogue by using the characters to ask questions about the setting that are answered by another character, slowly forming a picture of the setting in the minds of the audience.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to stay awake all the time with the lights on with no hope of leaving a specific place.  I think eventually I would go mindless and become numb to my surroundings.  At least, I hope that I would.  Garcin reacts to this type of hell as one of the torturing aspects of the hell he has heard about.  I could make my daily activities a daily routine with no change whatsoever.  Every day, I would do everything exactly the same, with no variations.  This is a circumstance that reinforces the experience of hell, being stuck in a state of preservation.