However sitting around and talking about their past lives, they get on each other’s nerves and they wind up yelling and screaming at each other. Since this is Hell, they wonder when the torturer will arrive, but the torturer never shows up. They don’t know each other, but together they try to figure out what they each did while they were alive that got them sentenced to Hell. One man and two women know that they have arrived in Hell.

In the play, Hell is a sitting room with three sofas. I watched two separate performances of the play including the 1962 movie. ‘No Exit’ is the first play of Sartre’s that I have read. Never mind his philosophy Jean-Paul Sartre wrote great fiction. Later I would read his excellent short novel ‘Nausea’. I read the first novel ‘The Age of Reason’ of his ‘Roads to Freedom’ trilogy and was so captivated that I immediately read the other two novels ‘The Reprieve’ and ‘Troubled Sleep’.

His fiction was very easy to follow and was entirely engaging for me. However when I finally did turn to Sartre’s fiction in the early 1990s, I got a pleasant surprise. I figured his fiction would be way too abstract and metaphysical for me. I knew that Sartre was also a novelist, but although I was reading every other famous and deep novelist, I was too intimidated by Sartre. I never did figure it out, but the Ortega y Gasset sentence ‘I am myself plus my circumstances’ pretty well sums it up for me. I remember a long time ago trying to figure out what existentialism is. Are you intimidated by Jean-Paul Sartre? I used to be terribly intimidated by this French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic Jean-Paul Sartre, the only person ever to turn down the Nobel Prize in Literature.

No exit a novel book review