Huis Clos (i think "through the keyhole") translated to No Exit and In Camera in English is Sartre's most famous novel, "Hell is other people" contained therein. I much prefer Sartre's style in his plays, perhaps because he is forced to "show and not tell" if that's the rule.
This little scene of hell is used to demonstrate the philosophical idea of Mauvaise Foi (Bad Faith) - Sartre's main component of his moral philosophy. There are two aspects shown in these characters: 1) they cannot convince themselves of their own authenticity and 2) they cannot convince the others. "Hell is other people" then articulates the idea that as long as other people are around, we're not ever going to be able to convince ourselves that we're okay. One is in Bad faith when one relegates a moral decision to some form that exists outside ourselves: e.g. I can't steal that bread because I'm a Christian. The tenet is one then that stems from Nietzschean directives to reinvent one's values. The three characters crimes are thus: Garcin - flees conscription, claiming to be a pacifist, he now tries to convince the others and himself that he is not a cowaard, Estelle - commits matricide, driving a lover to commit suicide, her bad faith is then a denial that she held any responsibility toward her man or her child, and Ines - A Lesbian who is killed by her female lover in a double suicide after they conspired to kill the lover's husband, again, she seems to blame her actions on "who she is" rather than accepting her absolute freedom.
Sartre's characters are never particularly likable, but this play carries so much interest - trying to find out what happened, how they will react to each other etc. - that it is enthralling. As a side-note, it does seem like the first job of any new moral philosophy requires accepted moral rights and wrongs to find a place within its framework - always is interesting though! At one point Camus was going to act as Garcin in this play, but I think it ended up falling through - it's a part of how their friendship started.
