A review by capy
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre

dark reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

One always dies too soon-- or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are your life, and nothing else.

It’s what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of.

jean-paul sartre, you would've loved psychological horror games! this was an interesting play on the influential relationship between the human gaze and self-perception, although i found it hard to understand the extreme lengths these deluded characters go to simply for each other's validation. the writing isn't challenging but the dialogue is layered and deserves extra attention if you're reading the play, i would've missed a lot of interesting lines had i only seen it performed

Could hell be described as too much of anything without a break? Are variety, moderation and balance instruments we use to keep us from boiling in any inferno of excess (...)?

the climax of the play being the "hell is other people" tagline didn't land as hard for me as i had hoped either, maybe because i expected it, but this is still a solid read (and makes me miss 'the good place')