Mirrors. Can't Live With Them and Can't Live Without Them

            In Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, there is a group of people that have found themselves in Hell. In the beginning, Hell seems very different than most people would think Hell is going to be like. They all show up and have different visions of how Hell will be but the one thing that they all thought was that there would be torturers that would torture them all day and forever. In the beginning, Garcin asks, “But, I say, where are the instruments of torture?” (4). Everybody thinks about Hell as a place of fire and Hell but Sartre could have been trying to portray Hell in another way. I think that Sartre was portraying the torture in Hell as the inability to see oneself. One can see this by the way that Estelle struggles with the way that she sees her self that she is unable to correctly see herself.

            Sartre shows through a series of events that in Hell you lose your ability to see yourself. Estelle is an extremely vain woman that thought that she was not supposed to be in Hell and she does not admit why she is actually in Hell. Estelle also thought very highly of herself and thought that she deserved much better than what she was given and what is in Hell. When Estelle enters the room, she automatically starts to complain and talk about the decorations and furniture that is in the room; Estelle says, “It’s those sofas. They’re so hideous. And just look how they’ve been arranged… I suppose each of us has a sofa of his own. Is this one mine? [To the VALET] But you can’t expect me to sit on that one. It would be too horrible for words. I’m in pale blue and it’s vivid green” (10). Estelle seems to always get what she wants and will not put up with anything that is not how she wants it. She goes as far to complain about how her couch will clash with the clothes she is wearing and then wants someone to change with her so that she will not clash with the couch. Estelle finds another thing that bothers her. She says, “Everything here’s so hideous; all in angles, so uncomfortable. I always loathed angles” (14). She is so particular about how she wants things and does not want anything but that. Estelle expects everything that she wants but she is not able to have it her way in Hell.

 The people that are in Hell are not tortured by instruments of torture but by the way that they are living. For Estelle, she has always counted for her looks for but now in Hell she will not be able to count for her looks because there are not any mirrors that she can see herself in. Without the mirrors, she believes that she can not know if she is really who she thinks she is since that is all that she thought she was in her real life. Estelle says, “I feel so queer [She pats herself] Don’t you ever get taken that way? When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much” (19). Estelle relies so much on her appearance that she can not even tell that she is really alive unless she can see herself in the mirror. Even though she pats and feels herself that can not even change her mind completely. She also can not trust how other people see herself. Estelle says, “Good gracious! And you say you like it! How maddening, not being able to see for myself! You’re quite sure, Miss Serrano, that’s it all right?” (20). She is starting to go crazy because she is not able to see herself and that she has to rely on someone else to help her with everything that she wants to do with her appearance.  It starts to drive her crazy that she is unable to think straight and see herself as she once did. She says, “But how can I rely upon your taste? Is it the same as my taste? Oh, how sickening it all is, enough to drive one crazy!” (20). Estelle struggles to be able to realize how she looks through someone else’s eyes and it ends up driving her crazy; she has always relied on being able to herself and see that she was real. In hell, she is not able to see herself clearly and how she was used to seeing herself.

In No Exit, Jean Paul Sartre shows us a different kind of Hell than most people would envision Hell. Most people think of Hell as torture all the time but a different kind of torture than what Sartre portrays in his play. He sees the torture as more of a personal torture than a physical torture; this hell tortures how you see yourself than tortures how you feel on the outside. This hell takes everything that you rely on and makes you think differently of yourself and takes away from you everything that you thought you needed. For Estelle, that was taking away mirrors so that she would not be able to see herself and that made her crazy in the long run. Sartre used this example to show how Hell changed the way that Estelle was able to see herself.