A Short Stay in Hell

“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?”

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 context of eternity, any span of years is “short.”

“How odd to find a book that looks as if I wrote it, when it’s really just one of the random possibilities that exist here.”

Throughout the text, Peck utilizes surrealist elements to craft an eerie vision of Hell. Here, Soren expresses vague bewilderment over finding a book that corresponds to his narration (his expression is itself written into the book), creating a dreamlike effect.

“Questions plagued me. Was I supposed to pray? The demon said God was called Ahura Mazda. Was he kind and loving? What was his nature? Was it even a he, like the God I’d worshiped all my life as a Mormon? Could it be a Goddess? I had no way to know. How do you pray if you don’t know what God is like?”

These are the initial questions that spring to mind as Soren experiences his first wave of Crises of Belief in the Afterlife. Despite having been told that Zoroastrianism is the correct religion, he has not been given any information about Zoroastrianism. This lack of fundamental knowledge heightens his internal crisis and, by extension, the psychologically torturous nature of Hell.

“You are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.”

The final rule on the library sign offers a partial explanation for why Soren is in Hell without actually following through on it (the “something” is never revealed). Paradoxically, the sign both encourages and discourages consideration of what the lesson of Hell is supposed to be. This is yet another psychological game that functions as a subtle form of torture for the residents of the library, but it also warns against the kind of certainty (e.g., of one’s religious beliefs) that the novella repeatedly critiques.

“There’s a second-by-second account of our lives, probably in multiple volumes, a minute-by-minute account, an hour-by-hour, a day-by-day. There’s one that covers the events of our lives as viewed by our mothers, one by our fathers, one by our neighbors, one by our dogs. There must be thousands of our biographies here. Which one do they want, I wonder?”

At face value, Soren and the other residents of the library are given a very clear directive to find the book that tells their life story. As they begin to consider this instruction more deeply, however, they realize that it is actually incredibly unclear. Very quickly, their mission transforms from a discrete task to a nearly impossible one, highlighting the deceptively torturous nature of this version of Hell.

“My dad was still living when I died. I hope he ends up in a nice Hell.”

Throughout the text, Peck utilizes humor to highlight the absurdity of Soren’s circumstances. The oxymoronic phrase “nice Hell” is comical but also highlights how learning what happens after death has profoundly altered Soren’s hopes for his family for the worse.

“Within a few minutes we all found meaningful, or terrible, stories about sacks in our lives. I even shared a story about a sack I threw away at Christmastime with a fifty dollar check in it.”

The novel juxtaposes Biscuit’s story about his green sack, which carries immense personal meaning, with the subsequent ability of every other person in the group to conjure up a meaningful story related to a sack. This suggests that which events one chooses to remember as meaningful is largely arbitrary, deepening the novel’s exploration of the human impulse to impose order on chaos.

“Don’t you see? This gives us the number of years we’ll search before finding what we seek. Sack signifies that the thing that has the most meaning to us here, the book with our life story, will be found in ten years. It gives the times and seasons of our stay here. It might mean ten days or ten weeks, but I suspect given the magnitude of our task ten years is not unreasonable.”

Biscuit’s numerological interpretation of the “sack it” book is a prime example of a character searching for meaning in randomness. The certainty of his tone when presenting this interpretation only underscores the illogical nature of his thought process, thereby undercutting any authority he previously claimed. In retrospect, his estimation that finding the correct book could take 10 years is also comedically off target, highlighting how difficult it is for humans to conceptualize the library’s true scale.

“Just as I believed in the physical reality presented to me, I believed I would find the book about my life I was expected to find and one day slip it into the appointed slot and be free. I wondered why I believed it all. But I clearly did.”

Despite the crises of belief that Soren experiences, he maintains the firm belief that his time in the library will eventually come to an end. The novella ultimately suggests that humans have a deeply rooted need to believe in something, even if they recognize there is no logical reason to do so.

“I began to think how strange it seemed that I never met a single person of color. Not an Asian, not a black person, not a Hispanic, not anything but a sea of white American Caucasians. Was there no diversity in Hell? What did this endless repetition of sameness and of uniformity in people and surroundings mean?”

Peck returns to the question of racial diversity again and again throughout the story, citing the library’s entirely white population as one of the unbearably monotonous elements of the library. None of the characters can ever make sense of why there are no people of color in the library, but each one who mentions it seems profoundly disturbed by the observation. In this sense, racial sameness is another subtle instrument of torture.

“How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives?”

In passages expounding Soren’s crisis of belief, Peck frequently uses rhetorical questions to evoke the depth of his protagonist’s confusion. Here, Soren’s use of the generic “you” demands that readers place themselves in his shoes and grapple with the same questions that he is wrestling with. In keeping with its depiction of existence’s apparent meaninglessness, the novella offers no firm answers to these questions, but it does suggest the value of holding on to faith or hope in the face of them.

“‘The bat housed again four leaves of it.’ There was a deep silence as people pondered the significance of this passage.”

The comedically solemn tone of this moment undercuts the university members’ ascription of deeper meaning to this nonsensical sentence. Indeed, the entire ceremony for the most significant text of the year suggests a satirical critique of academic culture as a whole in which Peck (himself a professor of biology) pokes fun at the scholarly instinct to overinterpret minutiae.

“I can’t tell you what it was like to find people again. I think the first man we ran into thought we were off our rocker, but it had been over nine years since we had seen another face, and we couldn’t leave him alone. I’m sure he felt like a celebrity with all of us fawning over him. Nine years with only eight faces. It was horrible.”

Rachel describes the feeling of encountering a new person for the first time in nine years, suggesting that relative to eternity, it takes very little time to be starved of human connection. This story foreshadows how Soren’s millennia-long isolation from other people completely distorts his social instincts and behaviors.

“Why should I trust things now? Who knows, maybe in a hundred billion years I’ll find my book. I’ll stick it in the slot and boom, I’ll find out that, no, Zoroastrianism isn’t the truth either, but it was really the Baptists who were right all along and this is just part of God’s preliminary salvo into an eternity of horrors.”

Soren’s expression of distrust in Zoroastrianism speaks to his profound crisis of belief, which is, at its core, a loss of trust in information presented to him by others. Underpinning all his philosophical musings about the nature of his experience in Hell is a profound fear that he may not know what is actually happening to him because the explanations he took for granted, rooted in his Mormon faith, have proved insufficient.

“The days of this peace in Hell are ended. Kill them again and again. Rape them, torture them, cause them pain and fire. Leave not a moment of peace. Teach them the wrath born of their sins and rebellions. Strike them when they are awake. Smite them when they are asleep. Cut without mercy. Slice without pity. The day is now. Teach them the horrors of a just God!”

Dire Dan’s violent doctrine, supposedly inspired by God, directly contradicts the rules laid out on signs throughout the library, which call for peace among the residents of the library. This fanatical tone mirrors the language of religious extremists in the real world who invoke God to justify violence, thus contributing to the novella’s critique of religious intolerance. The novella also implies that such intolerance arises in response to existential uncertainty, as the Direites prefer vengeful, violent answers to no answers at all.

“They beat him until he fell to the ground, where they kicked him until he was dead. There seemed to be no malice in their actions. It was as if they were almost bored, going through a morning ritual that needed to be done, like brushing their hair or ordering a meal from the kiosk.”

In another highly surreal moment, the Direites are entirely emotionally detached from the acts of violence that they commit daily. While this detachment reflects their cult mentality, it also points to the emotional numbing that inevitably happens after living in the library for too long. Soren himself experiences this numbing, eventually becoming totally comfortable with dying by suicide day after day while falling through the abyss.

“I had never been filled with such a sense of rage and vengeance. He had taken Rachel. He had tortured my friends. He had destroyed our peace.”

Soren’s extreme emotional response contrasts with the complete lack of emotion the Direites exhibited just a page earlier. At this point in his character development, Soren has not lost touch with his own humanity. It is this extreme emotion, however, that ultimately sets him on the path toward emotional detachment since falling through the void with Dire Dan leads to his social isolation.

“Dire Dan was gone. I was never to see him again. Nor has anyone I have ever met since. He, like me, is lost in the library. Alone. I wonder, does he still feel he is the fist of God?”

As Dire Dan disappears from the narrative, his character arc remains unresolved. Soren’s final question can be interpreted either as genuine curiosity or as a satisfied, sarcastic takedown of Dire Dan’s hubris. Either way, it points to the apparent insignificance of any given individual in the face of the library’s immensity.

“He had never heard of the Direites, which I was glad to learn. Their influence had been so profound in my area of the library I was afraid it had spread everywhere. As I explained their views, he shook his head in wonder and sadness.”

This stranger’s complete ignorance of Dire Dan illustrates the library’s vastness, evoking the isolation of different cultures from one another through physical distance. With more books than there are electrons in the universe, the library is of fantastical size, though its exact dimensions remain a mystery for the duration of the text.

“I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.”

Once again, Peck champions diversity as an essential part of quality of life. Here, that diversity transcends race conversations and takes on the fantastical quality of inter-universal diversity. This emphasis on diversity reflects not only the novella’s pluralistic ethos but also Soren’s broader desire for hope, which hinges on the possibility of change or difference.

“I know she dwells somewhere in this vast library; like the book of my life, she exists somewhere.”

After their separation, Rachel becomes a figure parallel to the book containing Soren’s life story. This framing equates love with the possibility of redemption symbolized by the book. Both have become distant dreams for Soren by this point, yet the fact that he holds on to the knowledge of their existence gives the novella’s conclusion a bittersweet rather than entirely bleak tone.

“Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.”

A Short Stay examines humanity’s inability to comprehend the infinite or eternal. Even though Soren gains the ability to remember everything perfectly upon entering Hell, he does not gain the ability to distinguish between numbers beyond the human scale and infinity. In this respect, unlike in others, he remains very human by the end of the book.

“With a herculean effort of will, I pulled my remaining torso over the rail. ‘I’m coming, Wand,’ I said, beaming brightly as I died.”

The tonal dissonance between the graphic violence that Soren experiences in this scene and his cheerful emotional state indicates how his time in the library has changed him, as he does not respond to events as most living people would. Knowing that he will wake up the next day, Soren’s “death” is ultimately inconsequential to him.