33 pages • 1 hour read
A Short Stay in Hell
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, sexual content, mental illness, and graphic violence.
Soren Johansson
Soren Johansson is the protagonist of A Short Stay in Hell, as well as its narrator. A devout Mormon who dies in middle age of cancer, he struggles to come to terms with the discovery that his long-held religious beliefs are incorrect. This Crisis of Belief in the Afterlife is a core internal conflict that drives the plot forward and begets other internal crises for Soren. Peck devotes extended passages to Soren’s conflicted internal dialogue, including when he first arrives in the library:
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? Maybe God was a demon—that would explain much of the misery of earth life. Would prayer do any good? I could not tell (14-15).
Even centuries into his time in Hell, Soren is grappling with some of the same questions, never giving full credibility to the Zoroastrian reality he has been presented with.
