No Exit

Inez Serrano is the second inhabitant of the room. She claims to be cruel and enjoys having others to toy with. She is the first of the group to admit that she needs other people to understand herself. She believes herself to have been “damned already” while alive and thus incapable of finding salvation in the afterlife. This is possibly due to being a lesbian in a bigoted society as well as occupying a low socioeconomic station as a post office clerk.

Inez verbalizes Sartre’s existentialist ideas. She often employs Sartre’s concept of the Look in her interactions with Garcin and Estelle. She acts as a “lark-mirror,” offering an objective version of Estelle that conflicts with Estelle’s subjective self. With Garcin, Inez makes it clear that he cannot persuade her with physical violence or avoid her gaze within the room. Her viewpoint is built on the existentialism Sartre would later outline in “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” She views human life as only consisting of actions. What one thinks of oneself is of no consequence compared to what one does.

Both Garcin and Estelle try to physically harm or kill Inez. By placing the characters in an afterlife where they are immortal, Sartre demonstrates the greater impact of psychological versus physical violence. He also shows how violence is used to escape the Look of other subjective beings.

Inez ends the play as the same person she was when she arrived, making her character flat rather than round. With no character development, she serves as Sartre’s vehicle to explore existential concepts.

Estelle married a man who was old enough to be her father so that she and her brother could escape poverty. As with Inez and Garcin, Sartre gradually reveals her backstory, creating tension: Four years into her marriage, she met a poor man of roughly her own age and fell in love. Their affair resulted in a child. Estelle, wanting to maintain her posh lifestyle, killed the infant, and her lover, in his grief, took his own life. Estelle later died of pneumonia. Her husband was unaware of her affair.

Estelle is the youngest in the room. She is, at different times, a foil to Garcin and Inez, meaning that she illuminates their characters through contrasting traits. Garcin initially believes that self-reflection is the path to possible redemption, while Estelle craves intimacy and male attention.

She does not care for philosophical issues or whether he is a coward, only that he kisses well. While Garcin and Inez butt heads over ideological differences and the nature of human existence, Estelle prefers to maintain the status quo she had in life.

Estelle has deep anxiety about internal reflection and confronting the gaze of others. We see this when she expresses a “fearful fascination” about what she sees in Inez’s gaze, implying that Inez may have awoken dormant sexual feelings for other women. Existentialism has historically provoked anxiety about life’s meaning. Sartre’s concept of the Look underscores this, which we see when the characters navigate the gulf between how they want to view themselves and how others see them.

Estelle is a flat character who doesn’t change. Like the other protagonists, she serves to illustrate Sartre’s theories.