Jean-Paul Sartre

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Three strangers are shown into a drawing room with no mirrors, no windows, and a bell that does not work. They expect torture. What they get is each other. Sartre's No Exit stages Hell not as fire and pitchforks but as the unbroken gaze of other people, a gaze none of the three can escape and none can stop needing. Garcin wants to be seen as brave, Inez sees straight through him, and Estelle needs a mirror she cannot have except in another person's eyes. Each depends on the others for the self-image they cannot grant themselves, and each is exactly the wrong audience for what the others want to hear. The play's most famous line, spoken by Garcin near the end, is often quoted as a verdict on other people in general: 'Hell is other people.' Read against Sartre's own philosophical writing of the same period, the line says something narrower and stranger: hell is not other people as such, but the trap of depending on another person's freedom to fix who you are, when that freedom can never be relied on to cooperate. The door in the play, notably, is never locked.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In October 1964 the Swedish Academy announced that Jean-Paul Sartre had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sartre had already written to the Academy asking not to be considered, and when the prize was awarded anyway, he declined it, becoming the first laureate ever to refuse the honor of his own free will. His stated reasons were consistent with a lifetime's philosophy rather than a single grudge: a writer, he argued, should not let himself be transformed into an institution, and a writer's independence, his freedom to take unpopular political positions without the weight of an official title behind him, mattered more than the recognition itself. He also pointed out, pointedly, that the prize had historically gone to writers of the West far more often than to those of the East, and that accepting it in that context would have meant accepting an honor with its own quiet politics attached. The Academy kept the prize on its books regardless; Sartre kept his refusal, and the small allowance that came with the prize money went unclaimed as well, since French law would not let him give away money he had never formally accepted. He remained, by his own account, glad to have made the point and unbothered by the fact that almost nobody else who has ever won a Nobel Prize has made it.