Murder provides closure in fiction that real coexistence cannot

Evidence

Whereas Françoise’s murder of Xavière gives She Came to Stay a defi nitive ending, in No Exit there is no ending because there can be no death. Since all three characters are already dead they cannot die twice. All three are doomed to spend eternity together. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 289

Categorization

• XREF: This contrast of definitive vs. eternal-open ending connects to the book’s broader argument about how Sartre and Beauvoir’s fictional endings encode their philosophical disagreements. — connects to: A novel’s ending can function as an object-lesson rather than a resolution — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3990