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A review by joshknape
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
3.0
I first read this in 2006; read it more closely in 2017 and now at least a third time. If one is familiar with Jean-Paul Sartre (ol' Fartre, I like to call him), one probably wouldn't expect me--a Christian--to show interest in any of his work. Well, first, it is only No Exit that I have been interested in; second, I reread it more seriously only after seeing an explication of it, the issues it explores, in a *certain book by the Christian theologian R.C. Sproul that I read in summer 2016.
Sproul read Sartre's work, evidently including No Exit, and recognized Sartre's concepts of "nakedness/being naked" and man's revulsion at "the look" as arguments against belief in God. I considered this a lesson in open-mindedness to me, having thought I could have learned nothing from studying Sartre. It also helped that ever since my run-ins with an existentialism-spouting intellectual bully in my early years of college, I have taken a passing interest in the secular existentialist worldview (if only the way someone watches news of a murder or a train wreck).
Have you ever read "The Grand Inquisitor," Dostoyevsky's chapter in The Brothers Karamazov that sets out the atheist character Ivan's argument against God? A Christian could read No Exit for the same reason. Not that Sartre's argument for atheism resembles Ivan's--it doesn't. Ivan gives a dialectical argument couched in a parable, whereas Sartre's argument is more of an attitude, a visceral negative reaction to knowing one is constantly observed by God, rendered an "object" to be "looked" at rather than a "subjective" beholder.
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*If There's a God, Why Are There Atheists?, by Sproul. Formerly titled The Psychology of Atheism. Recommended as a companion book to this play.
Sproul read Sartre's work, evidently including No Exit, and recognized Sartre's concepts of "nakedness/being naked" and man's revulsion at "the look" as arguments against belief in God. I considered this a lesson in open-mindedness to me, having thought I could have learned nothing from studying Sartre. It also helped that ever since my run-ins with an existentialism-spouting intellectual bully in my early years of college, I have taken a passing interest in the secular existentialist worldview (if only the way someone watches news of a murder or a train wreck).
Have you ever read "The Grand Inquisitor," Dostoyevsky's chapter in The Brothers Karamazov that sets out the atheist character Ivan's argument against God? A Christian could read No Exit for the same reason. Not that Sartre's argument for atheism resembles Ivan's--it doesn't. Ivan gives a dialectical argument couched in a parable, whereas Sartre's argument is more of an attitude, a visceral negative reaction to knowing one is constantly observed by God, rendered an "object" to be "looked" at rather than a "subjective" beholder.
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*If There's a God, Why Are There Atheists?, by Sproul. Formerly titled The Psychology of Atheism. Recommended as a companion book to this play.