No Exit Summary

Joseph Garcin arrives in hell, where a gracious valet shows him to a drawing-room. The room is decorated with three colorful sofas and a heavy bronze sculpture on the mantelpiece. This, Garcin understands, is where he’ll spend eternity. “Second Empire furniture, I observe,” he says, somewhat off-put by the ornate style. “I dare say one gets used to it in time,” he guesses, but the valet says, “Some do. Some don’t.” As Garcin settles in, he wonders where the torture weapons are, noting that the drawing-room isn’t what people envision when they think of hell. “Really, sir, how could you believe such cock-and-bull stories?” the valet asks. “Told by people who’d never set foot here.”

After helping Garcin settle in, the valet takes his leave, telling Garcin that he can ring for him by pressing a small bell. However, he admits that the bell is unreliable and rarely works. Once he leaves, Garcin contemplates the bronze ornament before sitting listlessly on the couch. After a moment, he jumps up and rings the bell, but nothing happens. He also tries to open the door, but it doesn’t budge. Finally, he gives up and dejectedly returns to the sofa. Just as he sits down, though, the door swings open and the valet enters with Inez. “Did you call, sir?” he asks, but Garcin says, “No.” The valet then turns to Inez and tells her that this drawing-room is where she’ll be staying. He gives her an opportunity to ask questions, but she doesn’t say a word, so he says she can ask Garcin any questions she might have, since he asked so many. With this, he exits.

“Where’s Florence?” Inez asks Garcin, who tells her he doesn’t know. “Ah, that’s the way it works, is it? Torture by separation,” she says, assuming Garcin is her torturer, though Garcin quickly tells her that they’re in the same position. Having established this, they both note that the drawing-room doesn’t have any mirrors, and then Inez expresses her disappointment that neither she nor Garcin can ever leave the room, even for a walk. In response, Garcin admits that he too would “rather be alone.”

The valet enters once more, this time escorting Estelle into the drawing-room. Garcin is covering his face because Inez has pointed out—with vehemence—that he keeps making involuntarily grotesque facial expressions. Seeing him sitting with his face covered, Estelle shouts, “No. Don’t look up. I know what you’re hiding with your hands. I know you’ve no face left.” When he takes away his hands, though, she realizes she’s made a mistake, telling him she thought he was someone else. Embarrassed, she asks the valet if anyone else will be joining them, and he says it will just be the three of them. She then laughs at the couches, which she finds hideous. She insists that she can’t sit on the only empty sofa, since its color would clash with her outfit. Hearing this, Inez eagerly offers her couch, but Estelle finds this equally unsatisfactory. The only sofa she would like, she says, is Garcin’s, so Garcin gives it to her.

Thankful for his willingness to give her his couch, Estelle introduces herself to Garcin. As he bows to say his own name, Inez steps in front of him and introduces herself instead. Once they’re through with these introductions, the valet leaves, and Inez compliments Estelle on her beauty. They then discuss how long it’s been since they left the living world, and Estelle narrates her own funeral, which is happening as they speak. Able to see what’s happening, she says that her best friend isn’t crying. Her husband, she says, has remained at home, too grief-stricken to attend. She explains that she succumbed to pneumonia, and Inez says she died because of a gas stove. Garcin, for his part, reveals that he was shot twelve times.

As the group talks about their past lives, Garcin says that he left behind his wife, whom he’s watching at that very moment as she makes her way to a “barracks,” where she wants to see him, since she doesn’t know yet that he’s dead. “Those big tragic eyes of hers—with that martyred look they always had,” he says. “Oh, how she got on my nerves!” When Estelle and Inez shake him from this vision, Estelle wonders aloud why the three of them have been placed together. When Garcin posits that it’s a “pure fluke,” Inez laughs, saying, “I tell you they’ve thought it all out. Down to the last detail. Nothing was left to chance.” To determine why they’re together, then, they ask each other why they’ve been sent to hell. Estelle, for her part, claims that she has no idea, suggesting that there must have been “some ghastly mistake.” Inez finds this hard to believe, urging Estelle to tell them about her life, so Estelle says that her parents died when she was young, leaving her to care for her brother. Because she was very poor, she married a much older rich man. Two years ago, she explains, she met “the man [she] was fated to love,” but she turned down his offer to elope. She died of pneumonia shortly thereafter. After she tells this story, Garcin asks, “And now, tell me, do you think it’s a crime to stand by one’s principles?” When Estelle assures him that nobody could possibly “blame” a person for this, he says that he ran a pacifist publication. In keeping with his morals, then, he refused to become a soldier when “the war” began.

Tired of listening to Garcin and Estelle present themselves as sinless and moral, Inez breaks in, saying, “What’s the point of play-acting, trying to throw dust in each other’s eyes?” This causes them all to argue for several minutes until Inez finally realizes why they’ve been placed together. Calling it “simple,” she explains that they’re supposed to torture each other. Astounded, Garcin says he’ll never torture either of them. To achieve this, he advises everyone to keep to their own sofas and to refrain from speaking. And though Estelle and Inez agree, neither of them manages to remain quiet. After only a few moments, Estelle complains about not having a mirror to check the way she looks, and Inez—who is attracted to her—eagerly encourages her to look into her eyes to see a reflection. Unfortunately for her, though, Estelle doesn’t like what she sees, finding it frightening that she can’t control the way she looks. “I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become,” she says. Desperately trying to appeal to her, Inez says she’ll do whatever she wants, promising to tell her exactly what she looks like.

Estelle finds it odd that Inez is so attracted to her and notes that she wishes Garcin would notice her. This infuriates Inez, who yells at Garcin until he breaks his silence. Frustrated, he tries to get the women to be quiet, but Inez insists that it’s impossible to block one another out. No matter what Garcin does, she says, she will feel his presence and will know that Estelle is thinking about him. Giving up his silence once and for all, then, Garcin suggests that they all tell each other why they’ve come to hell, thinking that this will help get their “specters into the open.” With this in mind, he tells them that he spent the majority of his married life cheating on his wife, even bringing a lover back to his own home and having sex with her within his wife’s hearing. When he and the woman awoke in the morning, his wife made them coffee. Next, Inez explains that she moved in with her cousin and started having an affair with his wife, Florence. She claims to have “crept inside her skin,” making it impossible for Florence to be happy without her. Consequently, Florence left her husband, who got hit by a tram soon after. Following his death, Florence crept out of bed one night and turned on the gas stove, killing both herself and Inez.

After Inez and Garcin convince her to tell her own story, Estelle explains that her love affair resulted in a baby. Not wanting anyone to know, she and her lover, Roger, went Switzerland together. Roger was ecstatic when she gave birth, but Estelle drowned the infant in a nearby lake. When they went home, Roger shot himself in the face, and Estelle’s husband never suspected a thing. Now that the hell-dwellers have told their stories, Garcin proposes that they “help each other” by acting compassionately, but Inez refuses, saying that there’s nothing they can do to keep from torturing each other. After all, she can’t stop herself from feeling for Estelle, and so she can’t help but hate Garcin.

For a moment, Estelle has visions of what’s happening to her loved ones on earth, but she soon realizes that she has “dropped out of their hearts.” This makes her want Garcin’s attention even more. Once again, Inez tries to attract her, but she spits in her face, hoping to get rid of her. As a result, Inez curses Garcin, who feels overwhelmed and newly apathetic. Not caring what happens, he shrugs and agrees to become romantic with Estelle. As tries to do this, though, he spirals into a vision of his coworker, Gomez, talking about him on earth. He sees that everyone thinks he’s a coward for having deserted the war, and it soon emerges that he didn’t take a “stand” against violence, but simply ran away and was caught trying to flee. Still, he wonders if he was truly a coward, not knowing if he fled because of his principles or because he was scared.

As he narrates this thought process, Garcin realizes that he’ll never be able to change his coworkers’ opinion of him. Because of this, he asks Estelle to tell him that he isn’t cowardly. She gladly obliges, but Inez reminds him that Estelle will say anything just to win his favor. Furious, Garcin rushes to the bell and tries to ring it, but it remains silent, so he yanks on the door, screaming for it to open. Much to his surprise, it suddenly opens. For a moment, he teeters on the threshold, but he can’t bring himself to leave. Accepting his fate, he calmly closes the door and explains that he’s decided to stay because of Inez. This, he says, is because Inez knows “what wickedness is.” Because she doesn’t care about him, he has decided to convince her that he isn’t a coward. Changing her opinion, he thinks, will prove his bravery once and for all. No matter how hard he insists, though, she refuses to reassure him. He argues that he was “judged” for a “single action,” but she says, “It’s what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one’s made of.”

Seeing how angry Inez is making Garcin, Estelle tells him to take revenge by kissing her. He agrees that this is a good idea, but as he embraces her, Inez makes sure he knows that she’s watching, and this makes it impossible for him to continue. “You will always see me?” he asks. “Always,” she says. Exasperated, he separates from Estelle and says, “So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl.’ Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!” Furious at having been abandoned, Estelle picks up a “paper knife” and stabs Inez, but Inez only laughs, reminding her that they’re all dead and will remain so “forever.” This strikes all three hell-dwellers as oddly funny, and they throw back their heads, laughing hard at their predicament until, finally, they fall silent and “slump” into their sofas. “Well, well, let’s get on with it…,” Garcin says.