Hell Is Other People

The closing line of Sartre's play No Exit (Huis Clos, 1944), spoken by the character Garcin after he realizes that the three dead strangers locked in a room together for eternity will endlessly objectify and define one another. Sartre himself, in a 1964 recording, said the line is widely misunderstood: "If relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell." The room has no mirrors — the characters are forced to see themselves entirely through each other's eyes, illustrating Sartre's philosophical concept of "the gaze": the way another's perception can strip us of our freedom to define ourselves.