Thinking Outside The Box

1) Think about the place you have chosen as your hell. Does it look ordinary and bourgeois, like Sartre's drawing room, or is it equipped with literal instruments of torture like Dante's Inferno? Can the mind be in hell in a beautiful place? Is there a way to find peace in a hellish physical environment? Enter Sartre's space more fully and imagine how it would feel to live there endlessly, night and day:

My hell would be a place where I was all alone with no one to talk to. It would be white walls with a sharp painful sound of silence. The mind can be in hell in a beautiful place because the mind is a very powerful thing and once it takes control, it doesn't matter where you are. There is in fact a way to find peace in a hellish physical environment, but usually the people put in hell aren't able to find it. I couldn't even imagine living in hell endlessly night and day. It would be like dying painfully over and over again, which I have never experienced.

2) 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,' whether it be cheesecake or adultery? 

Hell is completely too much of anything without a break and I believe that moderation is what keeps us sane in life. When things come in extremes, you can get overwhelmed very quickly. Moderation is a necessity, for example, you don't tackle life all in one, you take it one day at a time.


3) How does Sartre create a sense of place through dialogue? Can you imagine what it feels like to stay awake all the time with the lights on with no hope of leaving a specific place? How does GARCIN react to this hell? How could you twist your daily activities around so that everyday habits become hell? Is there a pattern of circumstances that reinforces the experience of hell?

Sartre uses specific words in the dialogue to be like key words for the readers to sense where the characters are in. I can't imagine what it would feel like to stay awake all the time with the lights on with no hope of leaving a specific place because that would be very depressing. My mind tends to wonder to the things I fear and then I start to see and imagine the worst things. Garcin thinks his newspaper caused him to go to hell because of the war that broke out due to his newspaper. He describes the place as stifling hot.Yes, there is a pattern of circumstances that reinforces the experience of hell depending on what you think it is or what you believe it is. Garcin takes hell in internally.  He tries to ignore it, but bottles his fears up inside. In real life I would picture hell as someone stuck doing something they hate everyday and have to do it for eternity.

• Plato explains that we need to get out of our cave through intellect and become enlightened
• The texts both go from ignorance to understanding.  
• In The Cave, the prisoners begins in the dark punishment of the cave and are set free and enlightened.  In No Exit, the sinners begin in the light of life and are damned to hell as a punishment for their sins.  
• They both have multiple people facing punishment together.
• They prisoners in both texts must face situations different from the lives that they new.
• The tone of No Exit is darkly humorous while the tone of The Cave is almost dank and optimistic at the same time, almost encouraging at points.
• In No Exit, the absence of mirrors symbolizes the characters having to perceive themselves through others eyes.  In The Cave, the shackles and darkness symbolize the prisoners unwillingness to break free of their thoughts and become enlightened with the world outside.