No Exit

Posted on February 23, 2004 in Hope and Joy Reading

What’s beyond the open door?

I read Sartre’s play No Exit when I was in high school. The vision of three people trapped in a room where they themselves were the jailers stayed with and stabbed me like foxtail seeds in my socks. As I think back on what continues to affect me from all those years, I realize that Sartre’s play whispers its protests to me, especially the scene where the door opens and yet none of the three interdependently miserable people goes out.

What I’ve found most interesting is how other people interpret the door. I see it as the escape from the situation, the end of the dilemna. Others insist that the door leads nowhere or that it leads into fire or off a hundredth floor balcony or into a crowd where everyone shouts at each other. They choose to believe the characters in the book much as we choose to believe our parents, our teachers, our leaders, our pundits — everyone who speaks in the face of evidence and convinces us not to trust our hopes and our hearts.

Thoreau said that it was bad enough to have a Northern overseer, worse to have a Southern one, but worst of all was when we did the job ourselves. It’s awful when our families turn against us, but suffocating when we do things to ourselves. Our agoraphobia goes unseen by others: the invisible walls travel with us. The whip of the mind presses us into conformity. We fear the open door; we will not go through it, preferring the disasters of the present to the richly embellished darkness of uncertainty that we populate with our personal horrors, suggested to us by the world around us. Is hell other people or is hell ourselves as we have set ourselves among and against other people?

If one of us goes through the door, will others follow?

I fear that by going through the door, no one will follow. I will be alone in the endless corridors of Hell, peeking in on other dramas. Reason suggests, however, another alternative: that the hallways are filled with dreamers and free minds like my own, seeking their like.

If you don’t pass through it, you cannot know what lies beyond it.