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Like it or not, each of us is also the result of the social, historical, and natural context in which we are placed. Sure, the miracle of personality considerably shuffles the cards and scrambles the paths, but we can't pretend that the tree doesn't influence the color, size, and taste of the fruit it bears.
I can also declare myself a non-believer, for example, but just the fact that I've always tried to imagine what my own personal hell could be like, should I face one after life, says a lot. A simple dalliance with superstitions, ridiculous legends, and decaying cultural legacies? Absolutely yes, but it is precisely those and not others.
In any case, it's easy to say: alone, confined to a chair, perpetually awake and with the awareness of my past life, I imagine seeing projected on a screen all the words I never said, the things I never did, the people I never met, the opportunities I never seized. All those paths, all those infinite possibilities, all those branches of branches of branches etc. etc. that out of laziness, unsustainability, incapability, Fate, or other were denied to me (or I denied myself). In short, the warning "every missed chance is lost" has always referred for me to all the variables that compose an existence; you understand that there's enough there to fill an eternity.
Even the atheistic existentialism of Sartre had to reckon with the legacy of Catholic tradition, with all those footnotes that besmirch each person's moral code with repentance and that have become so invasive - for a few centuries now - for the (un)consciousness of Western man. This is particularly evident in his early dramatic productions.
If with "The Flies" - a bizarre revisitation of Aeschylus's "Choephoroe" - Sartre paints the microcosm of a small mountain community in Ancient Greece where the expiation of original sin (the murder of Agamemnon) is the cornerstone of a new religion, sublimated by each citizen's systematic public confession of his daily petty miseries, it is rather on "No Exit" - a one-act play first performed in '44 - that I want to focus.
An anonymous room with armchairs and sofas (but without mirrors and windows), an undefined bronze bust, a letter opener, three characters (a man and two women) totally strangers to each other, an ambiguous valet accompanying them in loco, and a closed door: this is hell according to Sartre.
And, let's be clear, not a metaphorical hell; from the very first lines, it's understood that these are indeed three deceased individuals and that, after the initial shock, they are perfectly conscious of their situation.
And then the carousel can finally start to turn.
Yes, because even if they never knew each other in life, these three seem just made to be together. No grills, no pincers or pitchforks, or Phalaris Bull; the torture inflicted by Sartrean hell is exclusively intellectual and moral.
Each of them is both victim and executioner, each is a faithful mirror (why, indeed, put glass ones in the room?) of the pettiness of their companions in misfortune, and this relentless game of destruction is triggered from time to time by trivialities that have an explosive resonance in a setting so claustrophobic and hopeless. A nervous tic, a word out of place, or a misconstrued gesture is all it takes to set the infernal mechanism in motion.
It brings to mind the future Vladimir and Estragon who, in "Waiting for Godot", will fill the stage with their seemingly nonsensical bickering and vaudeville acts, but, while Beckettian characters will always find some comfort in each other's company, in Sartre it is all about sharpening claws and tearing flesh. Beckett, moreover, has always tended to present his protagonists through a degree of abjection and despair at the limits of humanity (see the cycle of "Dramaticules"), whereas the protagonists of "No Exit" - despite being guilty in life of betrayal, various cowardices, infanticides, and induced suicides - display a certain indifference to their sins and speak of them with detachment: if they were alone in that room, you can bet they wouldn't suffer for a second.
And yet the carousel keeps spinning, and the three trample each other continuously, sinking ever deeper into the quicksand of their interdependence. A total stasis similar to that of the protagonist of "Nausea", a situation without an exit well known to the characters of the stories in "The Wall".
Looking closely, more generally, one can also feel the echo of the more Naturalistic Strindberg for the brutality of the dialogues and the progressive moral descent, while more specifically, it especially brings to mind the Strindberg of "Creditors" for the attached scenic minimalism. Yet it seems to me there is a fundamental difference: Strindberg is above all a playwright, while Sartre is a philosopher. If in Strindberg, shards of burning truths emerged almost despite themselves from the power of his plays, in Sartre, an a priori meditation seems to direct the work surgically, which, if it loses in impact, gains in thematic precision.
And the carousel keeps spinning. Then, suddenly... Surprise! In the very last scenes, the characters discover that the door can be opened: an infinite corridor, more closed doors, and surely more damned souls.
Leave? To go where? To do what? They will remain in that room to torture each other for eternity, each bound to the other, each finally comprehending that "hell is other people".
NOTE: As far as I know, no Italian edition of "No Exit" exists that has been translated as a standalone play. It is always combined with "The Flies", the other "youthful" play of Sartre which (although I have barely touched upon it) would require its own dedicated page (as much else of Sartre's theater might).
In truth, therefore, I have only reviewed half of the book in question: please forgive me.
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