47 pages • 1 hour read
No Exit
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Mistrust of Strangers, Mistrust of Self
One of the central anxieties of No Exit is the worry over deciding who, out of a group of strangers, can or cannot be trusted when a life-and-death situation is unfolding. The main question of the early sections of the novel leads Darby to use clues to determine which of the strangers with whom she is stranded is likely to have been complicit in the plot to kidnap Jay. In Chapter 2, for example, Darby attempts to draw out each of the strangers in conversation to identify which driver arrived in which car, allowing her to narrow down who arrived in the van in which Jay is locked. Once she connects Lars to the car, she uses similar logical considerations to decide which of the remaining strangers to trust to help her free the little girl from confinement.
This “whodunit” structure is quickly abandoned, however, when Darby learns that Ashley, whom she has chosen as her potential ally, is actually another kidnapper and Lars’s brother. Darby is prevented from even potentially trusting Ed and Sandi for much of the novel, given Ashley’s ominous note: “IF YOU TELL THEM, I KILL THEM BOTH” (71). Soon after this prohibition is lifted by Jay’s appearance in the rest stop, but Darby receives another note, this time from Jay: “DON’T TRUST THEM” (110). This warning comes too late, as Darby has already—although by necessity—trusted Ed and Sandi. Indeed, this trust proves misguided; Sandi is in on the plot and attacks Darby with pepper spray. The novel does not present the dangers of trust as something that occurs only between the protagonists and the antagonists of the novel, however. Sandi, though a member of the criminal conspiracy, is fatally introduced to the dangers of trusting Ashley when he murders her after she lets him in from outside.
By contrast, Darby’s development throughout the novel indicates that she must learn to exhibit a greater trust in herself as a potential savior for Jay. As it is revealed that she cannot rely on any of the strangers she has encountered, she becomes increasingly confident in her own abilities. By the end of the novel, she is determined to see Jay safe and convinced that she alone can be the one to stop Ashley—although this conviction ultimately also proves false, as it is Jay, not Darby, who stops Ashley in the end.
Responsibility in Life-and-Death Situations
The conditions of the thriller can often lead to a certain moral ambivalence about violence in its various forms. While the genre is almost always characterized by a tense standoff between a protagonist and an antagonist, and the antagonist either commits violence or threatens to commit violence, the willingness to commit violence is not necessarily an indicator of antagonism (or “evil”) within the context of the thriller. As the tension increases over the course of a thriller’s narrative, the protagonist is almost always also forced to commit acts of violence in order to protect themselves or others from the greater viciousness of the antagonist. This violence on the part of the protagonist may be unwilling (particularly initially) but is not always necessarily so. The primary distinction in the protagonist’s or the antagonist’s use of violence is whether the character takes responsibility for their actions in these extreme circumstances.
No Exit traces its moral compass by looking at which of its characters accepts responsibility for the violent actions they cause—whether intentionally or unintentionally—and even occasionally for preventing the violent actions of others. For Darby, the novel’s protagonist, this arises in her willingness to accept responsibility for saving Jay, a task that she immediately takes on and then increasingly views as her exclusive responsibility, as she learns that more and more of her fellow travelers cannot be trusted. She views herself as responsible not only for her intentional actions but for her unintentional ones, as well. When she believes Jay to have died in the snow after Darby gave her the tools to escape the van, the young woman blames herself, despite her good intentions in helping the girl. Even when she believes Jay is dead and her own life is in acute peril, Darby is protective of Ed and Sandi and determined to avoid any culpability in their potential deaths. She thinks, “I can’t get anyone else killed tonight” (103). Darby does eventually lead to another’s death—she murders Lars—but she does not seek to shirk the responsibility for that action, either. She articulates her responsibility for the murder to Jay, then thinks, “Yes, she’d killed someone today. She’d stabbed another human being in the neck” (165). Though she does not regret the action, which she calls “just grim, dirty business” (165), she does not disavow it, either.
Ashley, by contrast, continually characterizes his acts of violence as something he is forced to do, no matter how much delight he finds in the actions. These rationalizations serve as central to his apparently authentic belief that he is not, at his core, a bad person. Though he failed to speak up to save a woman he found imprisoned in his uncle’s basement as a child, Ashley thinks that he has “never technically killed anyone before” and that “the closest instance he could think of was still more manslaughter than murder. And not via direct action—but inaction” (84). This commitment to technicalities accompanies Ashley’s violent impulses, with his rationalizations becoming less and less believable as the novel continues. He has to shoot Jay through the hand with a nail gun to discipline her, just as he has to deliver the same “yellow card” punishment to Lars throughout their lives—a rationalization that Ashley repeats so frequently that Lars, too, believes it. This feeling of obligation to do violence persists in Ashley even when he has conflicted feelings about his desire to kill Darby: “He couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t even sure he could hate her—his brain was a potent sugar rush, a cocktail of confused feelings for this tenacious bitch. But feelings aside, he still had to red-card her for killing his baby brother” (169). These contrasting modes of thinking about responsibility draw a firm line between Darby and Ashley, whom the narrative often compares as being more similar than different. Adams thus presents not violence itself but the attitude toward the violence one commits in a life-and-death scenario as the defining difference between a protagonist and an antagonist in a thriller.
Perception Versus Reality
The tension in No Exit relies on the continual revelations that things are, more often not, different from how they seem. As Darby learns more and more about the crime she has inadvertently stumbled upon, she discovers that she cannot trust her perception of events. At the same time, however, she lacks any means to understand what she witnesses other than to rely on her perception. This tension—that perception is faulty and yet, simultaneously, the only tool the narrator has to find meaning in the chaos of the thriller—drags the reader into Darby’s confusion and alarm, augmenting the suspense of the text. If Darby, as narrator, doesn’t know what is happening and cannot trust what she thinks she knows, what, then, can the reader trust in turn?
This lapse between perception and reality appears most clearly in the novel with the reveal that Ashley is actually Lars’s brother and the mastermind behind the kidnapping and trafficking scheme, rather than the friendly and cheerful young man he appears to be. This inversion follows a trope; indeed, Ashley quips that “whoever seems like the nicest character, at first, will always turn out to be the asshole in the end” (25). Yet the novel does not use its characters to suggest that the opposite of what seems to be true is true, either. Lars, for example, gives the impression of being a criminal and is, in fact, a criminal.
The very structure of the novel reinforces this sense of chaos brought about by the tension between appearances and reality. In lieu of formal chapters, the novel is structured by parts, which bear descriptions of broad swaths of time (“Midnight,” “Dawn,” etc.) and subsections that tell time down to the minute (i.e., “6:21 p.m.,” “1:09 a.m.”). Even this specificity is misleading in some sense, however, as the duration of the “chapters” vary; while one might only occupy a few minutes of the night, another might take place over nearly an hour. Though the reader has been given a clue to orient themselves in time, they only know the actual duration of the narrative events once they reach the next section. This leaves the rapid pace plotting of the novel vague and unmoored even as it is punctuated with moments of specificity. Darby cannot be relied upon to track the progress of time, either, particularly in moments of injury, which arrive with increasing frequency throughout the novel. When Ashley suffocates her, for example, she “[feels] time dilate” (91), a sensation that is repeated when she is lost in the snow and when Ashley slams her hand in the door. Ultimately, readers are left with only one thing to trust: the structure of the thriller. It is genre knowledge that carries the expectation that the heroes will triumph over the villains, though it is the same generic structure that leaves this triumph in perpetual doubt.
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