
No Exit.
I really enjoyed reading No Exit, I think that how completely twisted it was made it sort of intriguing.
I liked how each character played into the other ones weaknesses and they’re all so twisted in different ways it just makes for one big hot mess. I guess I just want to talk about how the different people relate to one another.
Garcin treated his wife horribly, and he did it for the sake of breaking her down. Inez did the same thing with her lover and with her cousin. Then there’s Estelle who has an insuppressible need to be wanted for the sake of being wanted, which is cruel because she strings along men with the intent to fulfill her own selfish need to feel like she’s desirable. I look at her cruelty and apply it to the others, like when Estelle is seeing Peter dancing with Olga she says “He belonged to me”, and I think that’s how all three of them viewed other people. As belonging that they could easily toy with and toss away and I think that’s the horror of their cruelty that they have no concern for life outside of themselves. I think that’s ultimately why they are in hell. Maybe that’s why hell, for them, is other people. They had no concern for toying with other people and that’s what they have to face for eternity: not just other people but other people who are just like them.
But what’s weird to me is that even though, in my opinion, they are so terrible to people they all are dependent on validation from other people. Estelle needs for Garcin to validate her physically, as a woman. She needs him to want her and to have his companionship in order to feel validated. At first Garcin needs Estelle to validate him in the sense he needed her to confirm that he wasn’t a coward, and then he needed the same thing from Inez. And Inez is probably the biggest mess of all because first off I feel like she needs to inflict pain on other people because cruelty is her identity, but she also seems to need to prey on impressionable women and kind of woo them into loving her in order to be satisfied. Like with Estelle, she acts like she has to have her and I think that is because of her need to draw her in… kind of like a spider and a fly.
ps commented on Janna Lyons!
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