Hell is other people
What Are You Going Through“Hell is other people” is invoked during a discussion of what people believe happens after death. Its force lies in the contrast between the familiar idea of Hell as an afterlife of endless fear and pain and the passage’s observation that people seem to reserve that fate for others, while expecting reunion with their own loved ones.
Use in the Afterlife Discussion
Except for the narrator’s friend and one other woman, who says she does not know, everyone in the discussion says they believe they will see their loved ones again. The narrator notes that no one seems afraid of going to Hell. The phrase “Hell is other people,” attributed to Sartre, sharpens that observation: damnation figures as a possibility for other people, but not for oneself or for those one longs to see again.
Meaning and Contrast
The phrase turns attention from an abstract doctrine of punishment toward the way people imagine who might suffer it. The passage compares this difficulty in assimilating endless fear and pain to the horror of life on Earth ending through nuclear war or climate change: both seem too vast to take in. Against that scale of catastrophe, the expectation of reunion offers a consoling picture in which loved ones are not among those condemned.
