Following in the footsteps of “The Library of Babel,” which describes humanity’s desperation to find meaning giving way to extremism, Peck subverts reader expectations by transforming the traditionally peaceful setting of a library into a hotbed of violence and fear. Dire Dan’s establishment of a religious cult, like the formation of a university in Chapter 3, suggests that even in the afterlife, humans seek out societal structure and culture. Soren describes their meteoric rise to power as follows: “The Direites spread like a pestilence. Their numbers increased under the promise of a bright heaven to come when they had scourged Hell to the utmost. Their numbers swelled to thousands in a year” (69). Both the Direites’ rhetoric and Soren’s description (e.g., “pestilence”) evoke biblical language, revealing Crises of Belief in the Afterlife to be one of the novella’s major themes; the persistence of such existential crises implies that the drive to find meaning is an intractable element of human nature, even (or especially) in the face of eternity. Seismic social events like this one entirely shift the atmosphere of the otherwise eternal library. In this way, the library gains its own history, with its societies morphing as time moves forward.

Once Soren escapes the Direites and begins traveling through the library in solitude, however, he becomes detached from that temporal framework that society provides. As he describes it,

I wandered for hundreds of years. Climbing, descending, climbing. I made some friends, took some lovers, fought a few people, protected others. I am glad to say I never ran into another group like the evil one that took Rachel from me. Yet I was never the same. My loves did not run as deep and rarely lasted over a year or two (96).

The cursory tone with which Soren describes his relationships with others during this period reveals their unimportance to him. This detached approach to his own experiences in the library marks an emotional shift from earlier chapters, in which Soren was emotionally engaged with what was happening around him. Ultimately, he reaches a point of complete apathy, telling readers, “The hope of a human relationship no longer carries any depth or weight for me, and all meaning has faded long ago into an endless grey nothingness” (102). As time wears on, Soren concludes that Human Connection Within the Context of Eternity is ultimately meaningless. Limited time is what gave his relationships on earth, and his relationship with Rachel, meaning. In the moment, however, Soren was convinced that his romance with Rachel could last forever and still be meaningful. Indeed, even in retrospect, he confidently asserts, “I think our love could have lasted forever. I’m sure it would have” (67). This contradiction points to Soren’s distorted perception of reality after billions of years in Hell, but it also speaks to a key tension that remains as the novel concludes: In most ways, Soren has lost his faith—in the divine, in other humans, etc.—but he never fully lets go of the hope that his efforts will “be enough.” For all its darkness, the novella’s conclusion holds out the possibility that Soren’s existence may one day be utterly transformed for the better. 

To that end, the novella treats the promise of human connection and the promise of escaping hell as parallel endeavors. Upon first seeing Wand’s lifeless body falling through the abyss, Soren describes her as “beautiful” and “an angel.” Starved for human connection, even a corpse takes on an ethereal glow in his perception. When they are separated, Soren very keenly understands how that loss of connection will impact him, as evidenced by his fierce search for her: “I was relentless. After the first month, even though I knew I had not climbed nearly high enough, I shouted her name on every floor. My every thought was of finding her” (101). When he cannot find her, he turns to a different search: for the book. By the end of the novel, however, Soren shows no real emotional investment in either pursuit, blandly describing even the possibility of escaping Hell: “I know there will come a time when I find my book” (102). Rather than Searching for Meaning in Randomness, his task thus becomes perseverance in the face of absurdity, all in the hopes that it will one day pay off.