No Exit: Jean-Paul Sartre

In the play, No Exit, written by Jean-Paul Sartre, three souls are united in the same room in hell. Garcin, Inez, and Estelle are placed into this unexpected situation with each other. They are faced with memories of their sins and the hell that is created is that they have each other to remind if their sins that they committed. In other words, their hell is one another. In this play, which takes place in …

…play about the unavoidable gaze of the other and how it restricts one's freedom. The play's central themes of freedom and responsibility come from Sartre's belief that existence precedes essence. Sartre believed that as human beings, we have no given essence or nature, but we must forge our own values and meanings in an inherently meaningless or absurd world of existence where we have the ability to choose and define our individual characteristics, or essence.