After a lifetime as Zenith’s most famous conformist, George Babbitt has taken up with a sexy bohemian named Tanis Judique. No longer a reflexive conservative, he has decided he likes short skirts and jazz and dancing cheek to cheek. For once, George is making decisions for himself.
Well, not exactly. In fact, Babbitt has exchanged one style of conformist behavior for another. The wild side he has embraced, on the sly, has just as many mirrors in it as the one he left.
Zenith never really lets Babbitt be himself. To be sure, Babbitt would not know how to be himself if he had the chance. Think of the groupings that constrain his behavior. Start with his family, wife Myra and his grown children, ensconced in their Dutch Colonial house in Floral Heights. There’s the Athletic Club and the Boosters, his conservative business peers, the men he lunches with and sells real estate alongside. There’s Tanis and her Bunch, the late parties, and the giddy, deliberate, boozy looseness. And looming over all three, late in the novel, comes a fourth: the Good Citizens’ League, formed explicitly to bring men like Babbitt back into line.
The League makes membership easy, but demands total adherence to his culture. When Babbitt tries to claim some room of his own — “that strikes me as my private business” — he learns that even private business is not private.
babbitt pays a heavy price when he leaves the fold. He loses clients, the Zenith Street Traction Company among them. Gunch, once a friend, crosses the street when he sees him. When three of the League’s men corner him in his office, the scene plays out exactly the way Rene Girard would predict: pervasive but quiet rejection. When Babbitt holds the line (“I don’t want to join — I don’t want to join — I don’t want to”), they turn their backs and leave.
So crossing into Tanis’s world carries real costs. The deeper Babbitt gets into the Bunch, the less it feels like freedom and the more it feels another set of expectations. The giddiness of the affair and the wild nights need just as much mirroring as the straightlaced respectability of Babbitt’s old business pals.
Eventually, he returns to the fold. What pulls him back isn’t disillusionment alone. It’s Myra — a sudden, frightening illness that gives Babbitt a reason to come home without requiring him to admit he was wrong.
In the novel’s final chapter, Babbitt seeks reassurance from his pastor.
“I just wanted to ask — Tell you how it is, dominie: Here a while ago I guess I got kind of slack. Took a few drinks and so on. What I wanted to ask is: How is it if a fellow cuts that all out and comes back to his senses? Does it sort of, well, you might say, does it score against him in the long run?”
He’s not asking about his soul — he’s asking about acceptance. And Reverend Dr. Drew obliges him with exactly the wrong kind of attention: “Been going on joy-rides? Squeezing girls in cars?” His eyes glistened.
The story comes full circle. One memetic figure has confirmed another. The order of the world has been restored — not because Babbitt found his way back to anything true, but because he found, once again, an audience willing to tell him who he was.
Heroism in Memesis
Huck Finn looks, on the surface, like the easiest case in this series: a boy who simply doesn’t care what people think. He defies the Widow Douglas’s attempts to “sivilize” him almost on instinct, slips away from Pap with barely a backward glance, fakes his own death without much remorse. None of that costs him anything, because none of it is really a boundary he’s inside of. The Widow is an authority he can dodge. Pap is a model only in the sense of showing Huck exactly what he doesn’t want to become.
The real boundary doesn’t show itself until partway down the river, and it isn’t a person at all. It’s “the larger swirl”: the whole inherited weather of a slaveholding society, absorbed so early and so completely that Huck experiences it not as someone else’s opinion but as his own conscience. That’s what makes it dangerous in a way Pap and the Widow never were. It doesn’t feel like obedience. It feels like being a good person.
The crisis arrives in Chapter 31. The duke and the king have sold Jim back into captivity, and Huck, alone on the raft, decides to do the “right” thing and write to Miss Watson, telling her where to find him. He writes the letter. He feels, he says, washed clean, light as a feather, ready to pray for the first time in his life. And then he sits with it.
What stops him isn’t a counterargument. It’s a memory: Jim on the river, in moonlight and in storms, talking and singing and laughing — “I see Jim before me all the time.” Up against that memory, Huck can’t find anywhere in himself to harden against him. He picks the letter back up, holds it, and — fully expecting damnation, not performing defiance for anyone — tears it up: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
It’s worth noticing what almost stopped him from tearing it up in the first place, because it isn’t really about Jim’s soul or his own. Huck’s fear, in the paragraphs leading up to that decision, is about what people back home would say if they found out: the shame of being known, the disgrace he imagines following him for the rest of his life. Even his guilt is borrowed. The conscience telling him to turn Jim in was never really his; it’s the whole town’s opinion, internalized so thoroughly he mistook it for his own voice. Tearing up the letter is Huck choosing one model — Jim, the river, what he’s actually seen with his own eyes — over another: an entire society’s mimesis, inherited and unexamined.
That’s Part 1’s triangle, played out with the stakes turned all the way up: a boy deciding which audience actually gets to define him.
But the book doesn’t let that decision stand as the final word, and this is where the thrill-as-imitation problem shows up in its purest form in the whole series — not in Huck, but in Tom Sawyer.
By the time the action reaches the Phelps farm, Jim has already been legally freed; Miss Watson set him free in her will before she died. Huck doesn’t know this. Tom does, from the start, and keeps it to himself anyway, because an already-free man is no fun to rescue. Instead Tom insists on an escape modeled entirely on adventure novels he’s read: secret tunnels, smuggled rope ladders, a message scratched in blood, snakes and rats kept in the cabin for atmosphere. None of it is necessary. All of it is dangerous, drawn out, and at Jim’s expense — he sits in needless captivity for Tom’s pleasure, enduring real discomfort and real risk for a performance with no actual stakes, since the man directing it already knows how the story ends. Tom even takes a bullet in the leg during the escape, and wears it afterward like a trophy. The thrill is entirely real to him. It’s also entirely borrowed: pure imitation of books, performed on someone else’s body, at someone else’s cost.
Where Babbitt eventually capitulates back into the boundary he tried to leave, Huck does the opposite. By the novel’s last page, Aunt Sally is making noises about adopting him and finishing the civilizing the Widow started. Huck doesn’t negotiate, and he doesn’t return. He leaves: “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
It’s the one resolution in this whole series that isn’t a return to a boundary, an exile from one, or a tense standoff inside one. It’s simply refusing to be drawn back into the mesh at all — which is its own kind of ending, and maybe the hardest one a storyteller can earn honestly.
No Exit
If Huck shows mimetic identity escaping its boundary, No Exit shows what happens when there’s no boundary left to escape — only the people inside the room with you.
Three characters, recently dead, are shown into a single drawing room: Garcin, a journalist executed for desertion; Inez, a postal clerk who seduced her cousin’s wife; Estelle, a socialite who drowned her own infant. There’s no rack, no fire, nothing resembling the hell any of them expected. Garcin even jokes about it at first. Then the valet leaves, the door shuts, and it becomes clear there are no mirrors in the room either.
That detail is the whole machine in miniature. Without a mirror, none of them can confirm their own face except through how the other two look at them, which means each is now permanently dependent on people who have every reason to lie, flatter, or wound. Sartre builds a closed triangle out of exactly that dependency: Estelle wants Garcin to want her, because a man’s desire is the only proof of her own beauty she has left. Garcin wants Inez to believe he wasn’t a coward, because Estelle’s good opinion is worthless to him — she’d say anything to keep him close. And Inez wants Estelle, who can’t stand her. Every line of force in the room points at someone who is, at that exact moment, looking somewhere else. Three people, and not one of them is the audience the others actually need.
What makes the play a sharper diagram of mimetic crisis than almost anything else in this series is what happens when the door, for no announced reason, swings open. Nothing is holding them in the room. No League of Good Citizens, no social cost waiting outside, not even a locked door anymore — just an open hallway and, presumably, somewhere else to be. Inez all but dares Garcin to use it. He doesn’t. He can’t leave, he explains, until Inez tells him she believes he wasn’t a coward, and she won’t, because believing it would cost her the one thing she has left: the power to withhold it. Garcin chooses to stay in hell rather than walk out without the verdict he came in needing. The boundary in this play was never the door. It was the need for a particular person’s eyes.
That’s the line that makes the title famous, and it’s worth being precise about what it’s actually diagnosing. “Hell is other people” isn’t a claim that other people are inherently unbearable. It’s the discovery that once your sense of yourself depends entirely on someone else’s gaze, you’ve handed them the only mirror you have, and they’re under no obligation to show you anything kind in it.
There’s no Forest Hills here, no Connolly turn, no contact that resolves anything, because the thing missing from this room isn’t contact. It’s distance. The three of them have nothing but contact, total and inescapable, and it’s exactly that total contact, with no boundary left to mediate it, that becomes the hell. The play doesn’t end in reconciliation or in exile. It ends with the three of them settling in, almost companionably, for eternity: Garcin’s flat, exhausted “Well, well, let’s get on with it.” Not a resolution, but a surrender to the mirror, permanently switched on, with no one left to look away to.