A Beastly Comedy Canto 1.6

The Underworld, even if it is equivalent of a hell part, does not describe a place of punishment set by any particular deity. There may be demons and punishers, but the main idea is that the work is firstly about the flimsiness of judgment, and how those who start judging others may end up becoming monsters themselves, and secondly it’s about guilt. In most cases it’s the victims who are judging themselves, somehow thinking that they deserve the treatment they get.

So even though I’m addressing all kinds of things which may be considered evil, it wasn’t my intention to define morals. Rather, I’m exploring the feelings that people have when they regret something they’ve done, and in the narrator’s viewpoint, the consequences of judging others. I also tried to write the narrative in a way that suggests the narrator is judging himself, that this is just as much about him facing his shortcomings, and he keeps projecting his own inadequacy and transgressions into whatever he sees.

He sees misery and identifies with it because he already has seeds of such guilt inside him, and maybe he recognizes some transgressions as universal, even if he hasn’t committed the same exact things. The potential for dark deeds exists in every human being, and so does the potential for self-reproach or even self torture. And of course the potential for love, but that is not the topic of the first part.