Garcin and Tomas

Looking back in my class notes the other day, I found that I had made comparisons between Tereza (TULoB) and Garcin’s wife. Garcin says on page 24 or 25 of the play No Exit that “[He’d] picked her up out of the gutter.” Likewise, Tomas imagines Tereza as “a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent down-stream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed.” While this is certainly a mouthful compared to what Garcin thought of, it still kind of has the same idea; both men viewed their wives as helpless.