Hell is other people : Wuthering Heights, Pan and No Exit

Abstract

Hell is other people. Sartre's play No Exit illustrates the maxim in showing how human desires and conceptions of the world are necessarily in conflict with that of an Other. Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights and Knut Hamsun's Pan, similarly, present the irreconcilable conflict one experiences with an Other that reduces existence to a figurative hell that is far hellish than any mythical representation of hell. If not factual accuracy, what, then, is the purpose of myth? Narratives and myths allow for the existence of alternate universes where the supplementary act of imagination can fill in the gaps in human understanding to create complete and whole conceptions of the world and provide an expression of, as well as an escape from, the absurdity of human life.