A Short Stay in Hell

The characters placed in the library face the task of searching an incomprehensibly overwhelming number of books—every possible book, in fact—to find their correct books and escape Hell. Drowning in this sea of random text, they seek to make the situation less overwhelming by ascribing meaning to the randomness they observe. The novella uses this fantastical premise allegorically to explore humanity’s need to make sense of an apparently vast and chaotic universe. 

This need is apparent in the significance with which characters invest random passages of text. Biscuit is the first character to do so, becoming obsessed with the “sack it” book within days of arriving in the library. His intricate numerological interpretation of the text has no basis other than his own desire to make sense of the nonsensical characters on the page: To accept that the billions of books in the library are truly randomly generated would be to accept the immense cruelty of their circumstances and, by extension, to give up crucial hope. Thus, while Soren and his companions initially dismiss Biscuit’s irrational search, they are engaging in the same kind of thinking when the novella flashes forward a century.