Neither for Sartre nor Camus is unbelief the cause of despair …; it is rather the starting point toward the only meaningful response to the wretched condition of man and the denial of human values—namely, revolt…. [This is the premise of] Sartre's dramatic explorations of the estate of man. "Existentialism," says Sartre, "is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position."… Both writers in their contexts mean to be optimistic in that they reject passive suffering and resignation to a higher will. But at the same time, giving to man the power to scorn, to appropriate, and even to shape his fate, they set the stage for their tragic parables adapted from myth, history, and politics. In these, man goes under because he deceives himself as to the nature of an alien universe in which he counts for nothing. His alternative is to create an intelligible world centered in himself through a free act of commitment, assuming the burden of guilt implicit in any choice or action.

Despite the obvious fundamental differences among them, there are certain motives common to the so-called existential theater, the Christian drama, and the late plays of Ibsen. The bid for freedom, deliverance from a state of captivity or paralysis, the desire to liberate and thereby define the self by means of an act of the will—the lines of the drama converge on this central moment in all three theaters. But if such motives and type actions are comparable, the concepts behind them are not. The human will in each instance is guided by a different ethic…. The existential protagonist starts … from a forlorn condition. Without hope (which is, however, not to be confused with Christian despair), acknowledging and yet resisting death and the absurdity of life, he proceeds from that awareness to the freedom of being able continuously to shape his existence by choosing to act. In the theater of his world he is indeed the "first actor" or protagonist, the sole judge and spectator. (pp. 262-63)

Although Camus and Sartre did not see eye to eye politically and philosophically, they were both concerned with the drama of man creating his own values, alone and unaided. They prize their differing brands of humanism, but each involves his hero in an act of revolt that marks the progression from the situation of the stranger to that of the man who conquers reality. (p. 266)

[The setting of No Exit is a concrete image] of a philosopher's idea of the universe, which traps its victims and from which there is no escape. What the characters do to each other and say to each other—these are the specific dramatic gestures reflecting man's awareness of his fate; they tell the story of his helplessness and fear, the desire to escape, the recognition of failure, and the abandonment of hope…. [No Exit demonstrates] the negative aspect of existential philosophy, the marred possibilities of life…. [For Sartre] the caged victims are, as well, their own jailers and executioners. (p. 268)

The irony of Sartre's drama of pre-existential suffering is that the characters of No Exit postulate a supernatural power where there is none. The question here is not that of overcoming an unjust fate or rejecting a superhuman, and therefore inhuman, power that would otherwise rule their lives; it is rather a question of learning that the universe is empty except for what men make of it…. Early in Sartre's play all three characters attempt to evade the knowledge that they have damned themselves and that they must inexorably pronounce judgment upon themselves. As every route of escape is tested in their dialogue and logically blocked, they begin to understand the nature of their self-created prison. (p. 271)

[It is] difficult to face the reality that by being what they are they have themselves contrived the logic of their suffering. As the sounds and sights of earth fade from consciousness, they are forced to turn to each other to find a solution to the enigma of their common fate. There are no alibis left because what each has done on earth is the unalterable sum of his life which, in turn, is the key to his present behavior. Once they realize that they are the architects as well as the inhabitants of their peculiar hell, they have gained an invaluable insight into this self-contained logic; but, as there is no opportunity of escape so is there none for rebellion. In Sartre's view, the myth of Sisyphus provides no model for the human condition. There are no gods to scorn, no fate to be surmounted…. Either man shapes his own fate in Sartre's universe, which is devoid of supernatural powers, or he consigns himself to the limbo of the uncommitted, unless, as in No Exit, he lays himself open to the eternal torture of having to contemplate his human failings through the eyes of the others…. Neither defiance nor remorse is possible in a situation in which there is no external system of values that the human will can reject or accept; only a stoic resignation to the finality of death which precludes new choices and redeeming actions, only a perpetual awareness of the self as a fixed object. (pp. 271-72)

Only what a man does defines his life; there are no other values except those which he creates by his acts….

In Sartre's play the human actors have paralyzed themselves through cowardice, crime, and bad faith…. [They] discover the hard truth that they are alone and that by their acts they are directly responsible for their fate. In No Exit the place is hell, and the dead behave as they did in life until the discovery is made. (p. 273)

Goetz [the hero of The Devil and the Good Lord], who plays at being the devil and then one of God's elect, discovers the futility of both roles and claims to have found release in the new kingdom of man. Sartre allows his heroes to liberate themselves not merely from the prescriptive ethic of Christianity but also from the inhibiting idea that man has to come to terms with any superhuman power. "If God exists, man is nothing. If man exists …" The Devil and the Good Lord is not exactly a model of philosophic reasoning, but it is a dramatic and, in part, ironic celebration of the emptiness of heaven…. There is no question here … of emulating the gods or of consenting in the irrational quality of life. The "unreasonable silence" of the universe is simply proof that man is alone and, therefore, by definition master of his fate. What Goetz discovers is that he alone was the author of evil in the first part and that he alone invented good in the second; thus only he can accuse himself and absolve himself. Goetz is done with the comedy of Christian brotherhood as well as with the melodrama of doing evil for its own sake. He has shown that both postures can be faked. Now, by choosing to lead men in order to save them, by whatever combination of good and evil this may be accomplished, he demonstrates that man not only can, but must, supplant the idea of God by acting freely and responsibly.

At this point, Sartre is more persuasive in declaring man's independence than imagining the terrifying burden of his freedom. The furies fling themselves shrieking after Orestes at the conclusion of The Flies. The play ends there, and all we know is that Zeus has been toppled. In The Devil and the Good Lord there is the opportunity to ask, What then? But in the tumult of the action the interesting questions about the emancipated individual get lost…. Sartre's doctrinal conduct of the play causes him to overlook the implications of Goetz's inability to love, knowing that heaven is an empty hole…. But Sartre's ethics and politics are far too rigorous to allow such an admixture of sentiment. Goetz notes his inability to love in the poignant scene with Hilda, but he puts the question behind him as he ends "the comedy of Good" and proceeds in his purpose of saving the peasants like a modern social engineer, discoursing on the inseparability of good and evil under an empty sky. Far from being messianic ("the kingdom of man is beginning") or exhilarating, it is a surprisingly banal ending to an other-wise witty play. (pp. 279-80)

The Flies, when it was produced in 1943 in occupied France, was regarded more as an act of politics than a landmark of Sartre's philosophical ideas. As such, the demythologizing of the story of Orestes ended with a flourish too, and properly so for the occasion. Zeus was shown up as a petty tyrant, or perhaps more precisely and philosophically as a nonentity…. The liberation of the people of Argos was at least as important as defining the nature of Orestes' burden, as he strides off stage. Yet today the play still stands on its own, apart from the political context of its original production, as an important statement in Sartre's work. We may read it … as a modern political drama having to do with liberty and the revolt against the totalitarian state. We must also look at it as a drama having to do with man's challenge to God, his assumption of authority over his own fate by emancipating himself from traditional religious and moral ideologies. (p. 281)

The Orestes of the ancient legends and the versions of the Greek dramatists was a figure of vengeance, and in Aeschylus' Oresteia his deed became a cause célèbre for a new dispensation of justice. Zeus himself stood behind Apollo's directive, his championship of the matricide, and Athene's final judgment. Sartre reverses both motives in his play in the interest of his theme. He creates a new Orestes who comes to Argos, but not because he is of the race of Atreus and therefore doomed to commit his crime…. Rather, he arrives like a curious traveler, a cultivated upper middle-class Corinthian-Parisian youth returning as a stranger to the inhospitable country town which happened to be his birthplace. The Orestes figure who fulfills his destiny by avenging the murder of his father is a tragic hero in the classic sense. The modern Orestes of Sartre who chooses to commit the crime in order to acquire a destiny is tragic in another sense. He is the dispossessed prince laying claim, not to the throne occupied by a usurper, but to the collective guilt of his people. By this act of moral daring, he wants to be a savior king to his people, but "a king without a kingdom and without subjects." And when Zeus cynically performs the role of the Creator of the Universe, in an electronic parody of the voice of God out of the whirlwind in the Book of Job, the modern Orestes becomes the dispossessed youth laying claim to the freedom of Man…. (p. 282)

Orestes' rebellion is defined by the nature of his antagonists, Aegisthus and Zeus, and by the contrast between Electra's behavior and his own. King and God have made of Argos a city where fear and remorse have become civic virtues. It is the model of man in political and moral bondage…. But though Electra's defiant dance of joy on the temple steps … is a bold challenge to their tyranny, it can be only partially successful. Zeus intervenes with a simple miracle, and she is banished from Argos. Electra is capable only of a gesture of moral resistance which is quickly put down.

The episode is a preparation for Orestes' full and positive involvement. It is a foil to his radical act of revolt: the killing of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra and the lifting of the curse from the people of Argos. Zeus remains powerless in the face of his free choice to take the crime and the burden of responsibility upon himself. It is significant that Orestes' motives are unintelligible to Electra. For, unlike her brother, she is locked in the cycle of vengeance, self-hatred, and unending remorse; following the crime she needs the torture of the furies to bear up under her sense of guilt. Electra's reaction to the accomplished act of revenge separates her life from his and underlines dramatically what his commitment means. (pp. 282-83)

The choices are clear in Sartre's play. Orestes kills Aegisthus and his mother swiftly and deliberately, not for revenge, but as a necessary act of commitment transforming the detached stranger suddenly into the guilty murderer deeply implicated in the fate of his race and of his city. As he takes possession of his life, he is struck simultaneously by the heavy burden he has taken upon himself and the freedom he has gained by doing so. Sartre's Electra experiences the opposite extreme. Orestes' existential transfiguration is incomprehensible to her whose life has been dedicated to hatred and the idea of revenge. Now that the revenge has been accomplished she is devoid of hatred as well as any other feeling except fear. But in Sartre's view she fears Orestes more than the furies. A man who leaves behind him all ordinary human emotions, who declares himself outside the divine law, outside nature, utterly alone, who glories in his crime because it set him free, determined to seek his own way and to be a savior to his community by taking its sins and its remorse upon him—such a man is frightening. Yet such a man, choosing this bitter and dangerous path in order to find an unknown but free existence on the other side of despair is also a tragic rebel…. (pp. 284-85)

In The Flies Sartre could still indulge in a kind of theoretical purity. The discovery that man is free and can therefore create his fate was—translated into practical terms—a call to a new life, a way of resisting political and moral subjugation, through acting and taking responsibility for one's acts. But by the time the war was over, the world had begun to learn the horrors that had occurred. The Condemned of Altona (Les Séquestrés d'Altona, 1959) incorporates Sartre's consciousness of a greater catastrophe, a more stupendous moral crisis, than resulted from the defeat of France. In view of the experience of the world war and later of Algeria, he must now deal with guilt as an ineradicable stain. In The Flies guilt and remorse had been a publicly cultivated instrument of oppression, part of an age-old myth that must be shaken off by an act of rebellion. Altona has to do with another world in which … deliverance does not come in the form of a secular redemption or liberation of the human spirit, but is attainable only in a tragic confrontation of the evil of which man is capable. It is therefore far less programmatic than The Flies. The difference for the protagonists is due in part to the change in venue from Argos (Paris 1943) to postwar Germany. (pp. 285-86)

The fiction of the inexpiable crime and the unappeasable dead invented by Zeus to enslave the Argives is now a reality; and the father-God figure of this play, old Gerlach, the Nazi industrialist, is enveloped in the guilt of his son. (p. 286)

If Orestes' act of commitment is the norm of behavior for the engaged existentialist hero, the conclusion of Altona illustrates commitment of the will to end a life of crime and injustice, as if the stalemate situation of No Exit had been broken to allow the condemned the freedom to redefine themselves in death. Orestes voluntarily assumes the guilt of Argos and goes out into the world presumably to shape his life. Franz returns from the war unable to shoulder the accumulated guilt of his life and that of his time until he is willing to face his conscience. It is a far less sanguine view of the exercise of human freedom since the choice is now limited to self-deception and self-judgment. Sartre says that there is an "actual liberation in the two suicides"; that is to say, the act of engagement is the breaking of the moral stasis through self-awareness and death…. Thus the play is also "an act of personal engagement" for the artist and should be by implication an act of engagement for the audience. Yet, the matter of guilt and conscience, engagement, liberation bears a greater resemblance to the corresponding acts in a play like Rosmersholm than to the existential ethic of Orestes in The Flies. Liberation has obviously a different meaning in The Flies. It is a question, to return to Camus's phrase, of man's being able to create his own values alone. Orestes' crime liberates him. In Altona Sartre is forced back to a more traditional view…. The double suicide attempts to resolve an unyielding moral crisis, since Franz cannot resume life in a resurrected and prosperous Germany and Gerlach holds himself responsible for the inhumanity of his son. If it is an act of liberation, one ought to consider that it is so by virtue of their returning to and judging themselves by commonly accepted values. It is as though Zeus and Orestes together capitulated before the invisible bar of human justice in order to expiate their crimes. (pp. 286-87)

Contrary to the Aristotelian legacy of a theater of passion, which he describes as "a rapid disturbance between two moments of calm," [Sartre] sees true theater as the staging of an action causing an irreversible change in the world and in oneself. It is always, in other words, a political act of engagement. (p. 291)

[There are] certain points of common interest between [Camus's] The Just and Sartre's Dirty Hands (Les Mains sales, 1948). Both are political dramas and focus on a moral predicament of our time: namely, the necessity of sacrifice to create and authenticate purely human values. Both protagonists pay with their lives, in an act of free choice, in order to transform murder into a value that transcends the brutality in the one instance and its sheer senselessness in the other. In a world devoid of absolute values the search for justice entails a voluntary giving of the self, not simply in payment for the life taken, but to create such a value—irrationally, imprudently, disregarding the immediate political interest…. The struggle [for Hugo in Sartre's play] is private and treated in terms of existentialist psychology. In his effort to shed his bourgeois character and become engagé, Hugo undertakes a job of political assassination for the party. But he cannot act except under a trivial pretext and at the wrong opportunity, and then almost playacting the scene. Hence the need to reconstruct the meaning of his act, unlike Sartre's earlier hero, Orestes, who kills in order to gain the burden of guilt and responsibility. Apart from Sartre's testing of the weaknesses of his modern protagonist, there is however in Hugo's second chance to make sense of his act the possibility of a free choice, and, like Camus's hero, he asserts his humanity and that of his victim in an irrational gesture of revolt. The sudden change of party policy leaves him with an act of murder done for the wrong reason. But instead of adapting himself to the needs of the party, serving a cause allegedly greater than the life of any single man, he declares himself (in the famous final phrase of the play) non récupérable, ready to face his own liquidation as a politically useless and dangerous person.

In the context of Sartre's thinking, Hugo's act of murder does not define him existentially until he understands that he has killed a man and not merely a party functionary who has outlived his usefulness and until he assumes full responsibility for the deed. Only by his last decision, made as a free agent, does he gain the moral initiative. Thereby he redeems his victim's name and the meaning of his life, at the cost of his own. (pp. 301-02)