33 pages • 1 hour read
A Short Stay in Hell
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Important Quotes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, religious discrimination, graphic violence, and death by suicide.
“One book I found not long ago was full of random characters except for pages 111 to 222, wherein I found an exposition that speculated that God had created the universe as a way of sorting through the great library, finding those books that were most beautiful and meaningful.”
(Prologue, Page 3)
At various points, A Short Stay in Hell engages in meta commentary on itself, including here, where Soren discovers a book about the library in the library. The thesis of this book is that even God is Searching for Meaning in Randomness, much like the inhabitants of the library themselves. Given the number of books in the library, the chances that Soren has hit upon its true explanation are close to zero. If he has, however, the implication is that God is using the library’s inhabitants to bring order to chaos, throwing both God’s omnipotence and benevolence into question. However one interprets it, the passage thus underscores the novella’s bleak tone.
“It was fair when you were sending all the Chinese to Hell who had never heard of Jesus. Wasn’t it? And what a cruel and vicious Hell it was. And your Hell was not our short little correct-you-a-little Hell. This was eternal damnation. At least in the true Zoroastrianism system you eventually get out of Hell. Do you have any idea how long eternity is? My heavens, what an imagination you humans have. What kind of God would leave you burning forever?”
(Prologue, Page 8)
Xandern is highly critical of Christianity, condemning the superior, intolerant attitude of Lester Green, an Evangelical man who indignantly insists that he belongs in heaven. This condemnation is part of the novella’s broader message promoting religious pluralism and cultural diversity. Xandern’s discussion of the idea of an eternal Hell also reinforces the novella’s basic premise: that humans are ill-equipped to understand the true meaning of totalizing concepts like eternity, infinity, divinity, etc. His reference to a “short little correct-you-a-little Hell” underscores this point; it is seemingly ironic given the vast number of years that Soren spends there, yet in the
