Thinking Outside the Box

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

• I imagine my hell as a dark forest, but ordinary and boring like Sartre's drawing room. There wouldn't be any torture tools, just trees and night all the time. Hell could be a beautiful place, but I feel like if Hell was beautiful then there would torture tools. Finding peace in Hell is like a needle in a haystack. Someone would go crazy if he/she had to stay in one place all the time.

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 ravenous sex? 

•  The whole viewpoint of Hell is a place that people will dislike, so it will never be too much of anything without a break. Passing time with cheesecake or ravenous sex doesn't change the fact that Hell is hell and it is going to stay like that.

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 showed a lot of anger and arguing in his dialogue which could suggest that the effects of hell are all negative. If they weren't in hell then there is a chance that the arguments wouldn't have happened. Obviously staying awake all the time with the lights on and no hope of leaving would be ridiculously boring. If I wasn't already dead, I would kill myself. Garcin argues, and in a sense, he is embracing hell because of all the negative energy he and his hellmates are putting off. Garcin is confused at first but once he accepts that that is hell then he goes ahead and embraces it. Some of my daily activities are already hell like school. School is really repetitive and boring; therefore, I associate it with hell.

 In Plato's allegory, hell was something you could escape by being introduced to reality, but in Sartre's play, hell is inescapable and it is personified as a character that does nothing but bad to Garcin, Inez, and Estelle. The only solution I can think of towards Sartre's hell is to sit and do nothing, but that in itself is hell because, personally, I would go crazy.