NO EXIT AND THREE OTHER PLAYS BY JEAN PAUL SARTRE

No Exit 

"GARCIN: Yes. And that way we—we'll work out our salvation. Looking into ourselves, never raising our heads. Agreed?" 

This seems to be a comment on finding one's answer within himself- much good that would do- in hell! 

Why the absence of glass? Maybe because it could show one one's soul and that is the last thing one should see in hell? Ah yes:

"ESTELLE [opens her eyes and smiles]: I feel so queer. [She pats herself] Don't you ever get taken that way? When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself

just to make sure, but it doesn't help much." 

and

"GARCIN: I'd give a lot to be able to see myself in a glass."

"INEZ: To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out—but you can't prevent your being there. Can you stop your thoughts? I hear them ticking a way like a clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and I'm certain you hear mine. It's all very well skulking on your sofa, but you're everywhere, and every sound comes to me soiled, because you've intercepted it on its way."

"Anything, any thing would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and ca-resses one and never hurts quite enough."

"GARCIN:[...] So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. Youre-member all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burningmarl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!"

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Fascinating dynamic- in the end they all needed each other. For one would complete the other in some way, but the third is in the way. They are so close to salvation, and yet would never achieve it. So they are doomed to live with their evil, without ever getting rid of it. 

The Flies

 "What, moreover, could you give them in exchange? Good diges-tions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah, the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content." 

"ZEUS: Oh, that's nothing. Just a parlor trick. I'm a fly-charmer in my leisure hours. Good day to

you. We shall meet again. [Exit ZEUS.]" 

Lol :)

"A MAN [falling on his knees]: I stink! Oh, how I stink! I am a mass of rottenness. See how the flies are teeming round me, like carrion crows. . . . That's right, my harpies, sting and gouge and scavenge me; bore through my flesh to my black heart. I have sinned a thousand times, I am a sink of ordure, and I reek to heaven." 

This is very much like Dostoevsky's Bobok. Where the foul smell represents people's sin.

"Forgive us for living while you are dead."

"ORESTES: I know. Not yet. I'm still too—too light. I must take a burden on my shoulders, aload of guilt so heavy as to drag me down, right down into the abyss of Argos"

The king uses remorse as a way of ruling: 

"AEGISTHEUS: You saw what happened? Had I not played upon their fear, they'd have shaken off their remorse in the twin-kling of an eye."

Zeus plays the part of the devil. 

"ZEUS: You have. The same as mine. The bane of gods and kings. The bitterness of knowing men are free. Yes, AEgistheus they are free. But your subjects do not know it, and you do." 

"ORESTES: Neither slave nor master. I am my freedom. No sooner had you created me than I ceased to be yours." 

"ZEUS: Poor people! Your gift to them will be a sad one; of lone-liness and shame. You will tear from their eyes the veils I had laid on them, and they will see their lives as they are, foul and futile, a barren boon.

ORESTES Why, since it is their lot, should I deny them the de-spair I have in me?

ZEUS: What will they make of it?

ORESTES What they choose. They're free; and human life begins on the far side of despair." 

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 Absolutely sublime ending. It's interesting he brings in the flute-player leading all the ratas away just as in the story Pied Piper. I never thought much about it- it turns out he is the scapgoat for everyone's sins, taking all the filth away. It is also somewhat like Jesus, taking upon all humanity's sins on himsef.  And yet he doesn't deny them the despair. It was the fashion of the city to broadcast their sins, and yet not feeling remorse for them. Only one day of the year would they confront their fears, and forget about them the next day until the next year. In this way, Orestes gives them the OPPORTUNITY to LIVE with their remorse. I love the way he justifies it- that something new will come out of it.

In a way the king needed the people's regret in order to rule them, just as the King in the Pied Piper story needed the rats- to keep the people in such a state, a low state, so that they need the king.  And yet they all needed each other- like in the Pied Piper I believe that they loved their filth and did not want a change. Just as in this play, the citizens would not know wha tto do with their freedom- lthey liked to be slaves. 

 

What do the flies symbolize? They are the filth of the people, the regrets, the evil surrounding them. And they prey on rotten filth, carcasses, because the people are dead inside. They are slowly killed by their remorse. 

Orestes leaves them with "Try to reshape your lives." Maybe they will, but I believe he has too much faith in this despair. Because sometimes, despair destroys and does not give birth to anything new. 

Dirty Hands

" What if we die and discover that the dead are alive and are simply playing at being dead? We'll see."

"What a shame he didn't marry you! He needs a resolute woman. He could have stayed in your room ironing your underwear while you went out throwing bombs in the square. Then we should all have been very happy."

I like Jessica- the first character, a wife, which has a great personality.

-- I didn't end up finishing it- the whole Soviet/German thing became boring... sorry...

 

The Wall by Sartre

"I didn't want that. I didn't want to die like an animal, I wanted to understand."

"[...] several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal." 

"[...] his life had no more value than mine; no life ahd value. They were going to slap a man up against a wall and shoot at him till he died, whether it was I or Gris or somebody else made no difference."

The inevitable sense of death made him look at life in a clear way and not take things so seriously.

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I very much enjoyed the ending and the way it played out. He was more alive when he thought he was going to die than he ever was. And once you understand this, everything else seems so ridiculous because you understand that everyone is just masquerading pretending to BE something while they will just die. It's not a pessimistic attitude I think, it's just real. For instance: "I thought it was funny that he would let the hairs of his living being invade his face." Sometimes I have such thoughts, that we are just ridiculous beings putting fabric on our bodies, walking around thinking we are something... but in the end we are all confused and are just carousing while the entire time death is staring at us, probably laughing.When one REALLY understands that he is going to DIE and EXPIRE, then he can truly see reality for what it is. And everything won't seem important anymore for in fact he is just a walking ghost, for he has already died within himself. And then, and then he is untouchable.

Nausea by Jean- Paul Sartre

"I don't even bother looking for words. It flows in me, more or less quickly. I fix nothing, I

let it go. Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up: I forget them almost

immediately."

"Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you

live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts."

“She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.”

It's very strange that the character envies her- he feels empty in his solitude... 

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say—yes you might say, nature without humanity." 

"My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves."

“There are many cases where even these scraps have disappeared: nothing is left but words: I

could still tell stories, tell them too well (as far as anecdotes are concerned, I can stand up to anyone except ship's officers and professional people) but these are only the skeletons.

There's the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isn't I, I have nothing in common with him. He travels through countries I know no more about than if I had never been there. Sometimes, in my story, it happens that I pronounce these fine names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury. New images are born in me, images such as people create from books who have never travelled. My words are dreams, that is all. For a hundred dead stories there still remain one or two living ones. I evoke these with caution, occasionally, not too often, for fear of wearing them out, I fish one out, again I see the scenery, the characters, the attitudes. I stop suddenly: there is a flaw, I have seen a word pierce through the web of

sensations. I suppose that this word will soon take the place of several images I love. I must stop quickly and think of something else; I don't want to tire my memories. In vain; the next time I evoke them a good part will be congealed.”

Do I have a connection with MY past? Even though we are the same person does that connect us? Or is it a stranger, which has lived and experienced a different sensation that I remember now?This reminds me of White Nights- rekindling old dead memories. 

"Soon I shall leave for another country. I shall never rediscover either this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass."

 

"I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered.You might as well try and catch time by the tail." 

Interesting point- when someone tells a story- the person has already lived them and has come out of them into the future. They are the finished product, and therefore it is a sort of life- for they have already passed through the future, while their past selves had not at that moment. 

"As long as we loved each other, we never allowed the meanest of our instants, he smallest grief, to be detached and forgotten, left behind. Sounds, smells, nuances of light, even the we never told each other; we carried them all away and they remained alive: even now they have the power to give us joy and pain. Not a memory: an implacable, torrid love, without shadow,without escape, without shelter. Three years rolled into one. That is why we parted: we did not have enough strength to bear this burden."

Are memories too dangerous to carry around? Do they become too heavy? And what should one do- only remember the important ones? 

"I jump up: it would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns: "I have to fi. . . I ex. . . Dead . . . M. de Roll is dead . . . I am not ... I ex. . ." It goes, it goes . . . and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. The body lives by itself once it has begun. But thought—I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. I exist. How serpentine is this feeling of existing—I unwind it, slowly. ... If I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill with smoke . . . and then it starts again: "Smoke . . .not to think . . . don't want to think ... I think I don't want to think. I mustn't think that I don't want to think. Because that's still a thought." Will there never be an end to it?"

"I am a criminal with bleeding flesh, bleeding with existence to these walls." 

"People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want to vomit—and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea."

I love his comment on the humanist, that the self-made man sees humans as symbols and not as what they really are.

Sartre keeps talking about crabs.

"Things are divorced from their names.They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic

and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenceless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me. They demand nothing, they don't impose themselves: they are there"  

“The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.”

 "[...] the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness."

"And I—soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts—I, too, was In the way."

"That black against my foot, it didn't look like black, but rather the confused effort to imagine black by someone who had never seen black and who wouldn't know how to stop, who would have imagined an ambiguous being beyond colours. It looked like a colour, but also . . . like a bruise or asecretion, like an oozing- "

What if things are not what we want them to be? Or the names we give them doesn't make them what we define them as?

"Things—you might have called them thoughts—which stopped halfway, which were forgotten, which forgot what they wanted to think and which stayed like that, hanging about with an odd little sense which was beyond them."

"Now I am going to be like Anny, I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar."

"Men all alone, completely alone with horrible monstrosities, will run through the streets, pass heavily in front of me, their eyes staring, fleeing their ills yet carrying them with them, open-mouthed, with their insect-tongue flapping its wings." 

It's true- what would ordinary people do when something abnormal happens? 

"And here is the sense of its existence: it is conscious of being superfluous. It dilutes, scatters itself, tries to lose itself on the brown wall, along the lamp post or down there in the evening mist. But it never forgets itself. That is its lot."

"No, they certainly can't tell me it's compassionate—this little jewelled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic: it spins gaily, completely self-absorbed; like a scythe it has cut through the drab intimacy of the world and now it spins and all of us, Madeleine, the thick-set man, the patronne, myself, the tables, benches, the stained mirror, the glasses, all of us abandon ourselves to existence, because we were among ourselves, only among ourselves, it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it." 

"[...] they have washed themselves of the sin of existing" 

Pain is self-absorbed.

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Honestly, I would have thought the character was experiencing some type of psychedelic experience... because a lot of things from his imagination reminds one of this. Other than that- TO EXIST. I myself don't really understand it much, but from what I got from it- it means that one has to be conscious of existence. And at the same time he seems to end with how existing is very painful and difficult only to find himself some type of goal making existence worth it. 

I really liked his style. Choppy. I need to read more of him. 

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