Sartre's No Exit

The choices we decide to make build our path in life. If we make the right choices, then your life will be the life you want to live. I believe that we were all destined with some kind of purpose. However, the choices we make will determine whether we fulfill that purpose or not. Thus, our choices will ultimately decide our fate. Through the years, we have been taught about choices and their impact on our actions. We have free will in the sense that we can either go on one road or the other. We decide what we do on a daily basis, moment by moment, and we decide what path we want to go on. In the novel, Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag was a fireman who had his life entirely changed when he met a 17 year old girl named Clarisse, and an old woman who

“In “No Exit”, a great play by Sartre, there existed a mixture of both authentic and inauthentic characters. The play begins by Garcin entering an exceptionally secretive room joined by the room-valet. Minutes after the fact, the room-valet goes with Inez and after that Estelle into the same room. They have all been conveyed to the hereafter room for their damnation. They begin examining what” happened to “bring every one here or at the end of the day how did each of them kick the bucket. Every takes swing to talk their contemplations; however the returns are not completely clear at first. Estelle declines to feel that she is broken and believes that she could have been conveyed here by slip-up and tries to persuade everybody in the room

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay titled “Self-Reliance” he speaks on the topic of the individual, creating the idea that an individual being independent leads to greatness. Emerson’s writing within this memoir is relatable to young individuals who are looking for themselves, an individual must avoid conformity and false consistency while following their own thoughts making themselves an individual. Within the essay, Emerson uses a range of rhetorical devices to prove that every individual can do great by being an individual and not like everyone else, something that young people everywhere should hear while growing up with the heinous act of peer pressure.

When young adults are presented with the expectation to join society, they lose the capability to trust their own opinions and enact judgment based on their morals. The inability for young adults to understand their full potential translates to them not understanding how they can achieve their future endeavors. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a prominent Transcendentalist, flourished society’s perspective on cherishing what they have without the help of aids with his essay, “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s essay uses the stylistic techniques of compare and contrast along with cause and effect. He contradicts society’s claims of what is deemed self-reliance and associates their views with false arguments. On the other hand, Henry David Thoreau, a widely-known philosopher, communicated his beliefs of self-reliance with his personal essay, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For.” Thoreau demonstrates his experience in the woods as one of the most important times in his life where he learned about life’s necessities and how to rely on himself. Both Emerson and Thoreau interpret the lack of reliance in an individual as an inhibiting factor in a young adult’s ability to achieve greateness in their introduction, development, and conclusion paragraphs.

As the author said, sometimes the fate can be changed by choice you make. It encourages the reader that it is always possible to change and fix destinies before it is too late. One important quote that the author wrote is, “This book is meant to show us how... our destinies can be determined by a single stumble down the wrong path , or a tentative step down the right one." (Moore xiv).

Before commencing a discussion on this quote it may be beneficial to gain an understanding of the key words or concepts suggested by it. Firstly, the two key words are ‘Decisions’ and ‘Important’. A decision can be said to be an “opinion, position or judgement reached after consideration”1. Important is defined as “Of great significance or value and strongly affecting the course of events or the nature of things; significant”2 and this is exactly the message Sartre is trying to convey. Our decisions can shape the course of our lives for the better or the worse so the decisions we make about the paths we choose in life can determine the state of our existence and define who we are as human beings and ultimately give us a sense of achievement or loss. A decision is a judgement reached after “consideration” that is, ‘why’ do we make the decisions we make. It is important to understand this process of decision making and various cognitive theories have helped us do this.

(Existentialism: We as humans have some control over our own destinies. We may not be able to choose our situations (like where and when and what colour we are born) but we can choose how we live our lives and what we do with them. For instance, when Winston has to face the fact that John is leaving in 3 months and he is only leaving in 10 years,

Yesterday, I enrolled for class. Now this decision was definite as I couldn’t go back and not enrol. However, the actual action of me actually attending was completely my choice; a conscious decision. Although it was compulsory to attend, nothing given could determine the outcome. John Paul Sartre an eminent existentialist, would argue that just because I made a commitment didn't necessarily mean I needed to follow through with it. Enrolling was part of the facticity of the in-itself. I had only made the decision, I had to follow through with an action. Sartre would contend that by forcing myself to attend if I didn’t want to would be trying to escape from my freedom. Sartre, stated that the basic principle of existentialism was existence precedes essence for human beings. In his essay, Existentialism is Humanism, Sartre attempts to answer the accusations. Essentially, he rejects the notion of any innate human nature; implying that because our essence comes to be after our existence, we are free to choose and live our lives accordingly. This essay will discuss Sartre’s explanation of the expression and the related implications.

No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre is a play about three characters in hell. Joseph Garcin, Inez Serrano, and Estelle Rigault committed a sin when they were alive on Earth. Now, they are stuck in hell together in one room. Garcin, Inez, and Estelle don't know each other and meet for the first time in the room. They are suspicious of each other as to why they were placed in the same room together.

In No Exit, a play written by philosopher and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, three characters are placed in a small room assumed to be hell with minimal furniture, space, and points of interest. The two women and one man are forced to face their own as well as the others’ sins and true natures, exposing each other in a raw truth. In many of his works, Sartre attempts to get important messages across that coincide with his philosophies. A piece that is easy to use to compare with the play is the essay The Humanism in Existentialism, as everything written in it are his own thoughts and commentary on life, how it should be lived, humanity, and how humans relate to each other and the world around them. That being said, he purposely writes No Exit in a way that blatantly disregards some of his main points. More specifically, through his writing of the characters in the play, Sartre very clearly demonstrates his contempt for and low standards of humanity by portraying each individual as having unique aspects of his negativity.

In No Exit, Sartre experiments with the meaning of existence and freedom. The three main characters, Estelle, Garcin, and Inez, each struggle with what their presence in Hell means, and the terms of their confinement. Sartre was a staunch atheist, and as such was not concerned with God or sin. So, for Sartre to put these three characters in Hell, the issue is not that they committed wrongdoings, but rather that they fell into bad faith. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre defines bad faith (mauvaise foi) as inauthenticity and dishonesty with oneself.

No Exit The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre develops the philosophy of existentialism. In his famous philosophical drama No Exit, he expounds his theory of existentialism. From his point of view, existentialism stresses that people are responsible for the consequences of their choices; therefore, the characters in the play are tortured by each other over their weakness. Garcin suffers the torment because he chooses to be a coward.

The play No Exit, by Jean-Paul Sartre, is about three people that die and go to hell. Joseph Garcin, a journalist executed by a firing squad for trying to desert during a war; Inez Serrano, a post-office clerk murdered by her lover which left a gas stove on while she slept; and Estelle Rigault, a woman who married an older rich man and died due to pneumonia. They all expected physical torture in hell. However, all they found was a plain room with some furniture that always had the light on, no windows, no beds, and nothing that would reflect or work as a mirror. The three of them were trapped inside the room. After discussing among themselves, they confessed their crimes and deduced that the torture was psychological. They also realized that they had been placed together so that each of them was to become the torturer of the other two. Each character began to ask things from the others to fulfill a need they all had, which only led them to more despair. Due to this, Garcin concluded that “hell is other people” (pag26). A. Petrusso argues in his article “No Exit” that the three main characters of the play have in common a display of cowardice. Certainly, all of them seem to be cowards at some moment and one character exhibits it more than the others. He also argues that certain actions and behaviors are merely the cowardice of the character when in fact, it rather seems more like fear. The examples and arguments used by Petrusso seem to simply catalog the main characters as

While Estelle's hands were tarnished with the murder of her own baby, both Garcin and Inez are indirectly responsible for the death of those close to them. For Sartre, all three characters are pathetic examples of humankind. Believing that human beings can never hope to understand why they are here, Sartre, like many existentialists, believes that each individual must choose a goal and follow it with passionate conviction, aware of the certainty of death and the ultimate meaninglessness of one's life. Nonetheless, Estelle, Garcin and Inez all exist with no real purpose and therefore are damned to suffer not only in their life, but their afterlife.

Sartre used this situation to prove that one’s consequences are not inevitable. We make our own design in our life, and we have freedom of choice and responsibility for the outcome of one's acts. By putting these people in a hostile environment, Sartre relates his idea of existentialism.