Trial By Fire: The Role And Purpose of Human Suffering in Literature As a self-described pessimist, I have often thought that, like death, suffering is a guaranteed aspect of life. There remains an eternal debate, however, as to what I, and others, should do when we are made to suffer. Some thinkers would assert that suffering is an undesirable condition which one should avoid, to the best of his or her ability, altogether, as Émile Zola and Bram Stoker do in their respective works Germinal and Dracula. Others, like Dante Alighieri in his work The Inferno and Upton Sinclair in his work The Jungle, affirm that suffering is a necessity, and that therefore humans should endure it. Individuals who hold such a philosophy claim that only through suffering can one become purified; only through the proverbial "trial by fire" can our lot in life improve. Indeed, both sides have compelling arguments as to why humans should endure or alleviate their suffering. On one hand, there are some circumstances in which suffering is truly necessary. Suffering has enabled individuals to better understand the plight of others, and furthermore, has the potential to inspire people to improve their station in life, as well as that of others. The lack of suffering and the excess of comfort for one individual can, in turn, cause others to suffer, and alienates the individual from others, both emotionally and mentally. On the other hand, suffering truly is an undesirable condition. Some kinds of suffering, far from being necessary for one to undergo to better understand themselves and others, are useless and could easily be prevented. Additionally, while the actual act of suffering can inspire individuals to improve their lot, it also has the potential to contribute to a defeatist and fatalistic point of view which ensures the continuation of human suffering. While both views on the nature of suffering raise valid points, and even possible solutions, neither of them present satisfying solutions to how to prevent it, whether or not the individual should try and do so, or even what to do if faced with suffering. The first school of thought concerning human suffering asserts that suffering should not be avoided -- in fact, that perhaps it should be welcomed, as it is a crucial step in the improvement of one's fortune. According to this philosophy, not only is suffering inevitable, but perhaps it is a preferable necessity, because a situation must become worse before it can become better. This philosophy is definitely evident in both The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri and The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. In The Inferno, the author, Dante, descends with his guide, the poet Virgil, into each ring of Hell, at the behest of Beatrice, the woman he loves. Beatrice, through her love for Dante, fears for the salvation of his soul, and asks that Virgil show him the torments of Hell. Through witnessing such suffering, Dante himself becomes a part of that suffering as well. This is evident when he enters the Ninth Circle of Hell, Cocytus, where Lucifer resides: he describes the fear that grips him, stating, "I did not die, and yet I lost life's breath:/imagine for yourself what I became/deprived at once of both my life and death" (283). This clearly shows that through being a spectator in the punishment of others, Dante himself becomes punished. The protagonist of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Jurgis, also witnesses the suffering of his fellow immigrant workers, but additionally must endure much of it himself. When Jurgis first starts to work in the meat packing factory, he notes "the various afflictions of the workers... of the butchers and the floorsmen.. you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb... There were men who worked in the cooking rooms... in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour" (98). Through being part of this environment, Jurgis, like Dante, cannot separate himself from their misery; he becomes a part of it. However, it is through being punished in this way that Dante and Jurgis gain a greater understanding of themselves and the world around them. For example, Virgil points out to Dante that it is not until he sees the center of Hell with his own eyes can he understand the true meaning of agony. Before descending into the center of Hell, where they are about to see Satan, who is entombed in a block of ice, Dante mentions to Virgil that he feels a cold wind, and is confused as to where a cold wind could come from amidst the fires of Hell. Virgil tells Dante: "Soon you will be/where your own eyes will see the source and cause/and give you their own answer to the mystery" (278). Since Satan, the originator of sin, is entombed in this ice, the ice is meant to represent the very essence of evil. This suggests that only through suffering will Dante be able to comprehend the mystery of the source and cause of sin -- that is, Satan. Jurgis, also, does not comprehend how far he has fallen until he sees the suffering of his friends and family in addition to his own. Sinclair writes: The whole long agony came back to him. Their sacrifices in the beginning... and their toil, month by month... Dede Antanas had died of the struggle to earn that money -- he would have been alive and strong today if he had not had to work in Durham's dark cellars to earn his share. And Ona too, had given her health and strength to pay for it -- she was wrecked and ruined because of it. (177) This also suggests that it is necessary for Jurgis to watch the anguish of his family in order to comprehend his own misery and the true meaning of it. It is thus through suffering, both vicariously and personally, that both Jurgis and Dante gain enlightenment. Not only must an individual suffer before he can gain understanding, but both authors suggest that the suffering must occur before the situation can even improve. Suffering, even in the slightest, grants the individual sympathy and the means to understand himself and the world around him, but in order for any situation to improve, one must suffer wholly and entirely. Dante shows this through Virgil's words to him as they descend into Cocytus: "There is no way/but by such stairs to climb above such evil" (285). This is, perhaps, a Christian allegory for how an individual must conduct his life; By seeing what is in store for his soul were he to end up in Hell, a Christian, like Dante will be inspired to reform his life in such a way that he would avoid further suffering. This suggests that only by suffering and experiencing torment could one possibly have a chance of reaching Heaven. Though this sort of religious imagery is absent in Sinclair's work, the idea is basically the same: the individual must suffer wholly in order to reach a level of consciousness which will, in turn, inspire an improvement in one's life. Jurgis himself only truly attempts to improve his life after he has been thoroughly exploited by the capitalist system in America. At first, he refuses to elicit aid from anyone -- this is especially true of his wife Ona, whom he firmly orders to stay at home, thus making her adhere to the traditional gender roles with which he is comfortable. As conditions slowly worsen for him, he attempts to improve his life by joining a labor union to fight for better wages. However, it is not until he is unable to find a job, is evicted from his house, and he loses his wife, newborn son, and most of his family that he is able to truly swallow his pride and ask someone else for help. By the end of the book, Jurgis tells his cousin-in-law, Marija, of "his life as a tramp, and his work in the freight tunnels, and the accident; and then of Jack Duane, and of his political career in the stockyards, and his downfall and subsequent failures," to which she responds, "You found me just in the nick of time... I'll stand by you -- I'll help you till you can get some work" (297). Through talking with her, not only is he asking for her sympathy and understanding, but allowing her to help him improve his plight (despite an initially weak protest on his part). In both Dante's and Jurgis's cases, suffering is not simply a tool to better understand themselves and others, but a necessity -- an experience that one must undertake in order for their lives to improve. There are, of course, flaws in the theory that suffering is a benefit and a necessity. Both Dante and Sinclair make fairly bold leaps of faith when showing that suffering can lead to both enlightenment and progress. When Dante, for example, asserts that the only way to reach Heaven is to endure suffering, he operates on the assumption of the existence of an afterlife. This is an incredibly bold assumption, as there is no reliable basis for the existence of is life after death. Émile Zola attacks such a traditionally religious assumption in his book Germinal. When Étienne Lantier, a young mechanic, tries to organize a worker's strike in the coal mines of France, some workers oppose him, speculating that there may be truth in the religious adage that "the poor of this world were rich in the next" (168). However, Maheu, one of the coal miners, points out the hypocrisy of those who perpetuate this idea: "If they [the priests] believed in it themselves they would eat less and do a little more work, if only so as to book themselves a nice place up there. No, when you're dead, you're dead" (168). This shows that not even those who say that there is an afterlife know for sure if there is one; if they did, they themselves would try to better thier own lives and behavior for the sake of reward after death.There is the question, furthermore, of why one should have to endure suffering in hopes of a tenuous promise of reward. While witnessing the torment of Hell may inspire Dante to try to obtain the rewards of Heaven, and the exploitation of the capitalist system motivates Jurgis to fight against his oppressors, I cannot assume that enduring such suffering will encourage everyone to do the same. In fact, it may have the opposite effect, and instead foster a defeatist point of view which benefits no one and creates and perpetuates suffering. Étienne tells the miners: "Why do you need a God and a paradise to be happy? Can't you make your own happiness in this world?" (168) The miners, clearly, cling so fiercely to their hope for eternal happiness over death that they cause unnecessary suffering for themselves, and convince themselves that their lot in life cannot improve. They are already in the most dire straits, but instead of inspiring them to improve their situation, as Dante and Jurgis did when they were faced with misfortune, they develop a fatalistic approach toward their lives and do not even try to better it. Germinal debunks the theory that one must patiently suffer in order to eventually improve. Indeed, the character Étienne views suffering as something which people must work to avoid and eliminate altogether. Similarly, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, suffering is seen as something undesirable and avoidable as opposed to necessary and inevitable. For example, when Lucy Westenra falls ill as a result of a vampire bite, far from allowing her to suffer, her fiancé, Arthur Holmwood, calls upon the doctors Seward and Van Helsing to treat her illness and take measures to protect her. The suffering that Lucy experiences as a result of the vampire bite is not something which purifies her, as Dante's suffering in Hell is -- quite the opposite, in fact; Lucy's suffering is a mark of impurity. The view of suffering as a pollutant is evident in the fact that Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing perform a blood transfusion on Lucy. In the midst of her agony, Lucy is "ghastly, chalkily pale," and Van Helsing asserts, "There must be a transfusion of blood at once" (158). The act of a blood transfusion suggests that the internal physical suffering Lucy endures must be purged from her, and replaced with new, "clean" blood. Additionally, not only do the characters in Stoker's novel try to cleanse themselves of any form of suffering, but they try to prevent it before it occurs. One such measure taken to try to prevent Lucy's suffering, for example is the use of various charms, primarily garlic, to ward off vampires. While Lucy is sleeping, Val Helsing "came and himself fixed the wreath of garlic around her neck" (172). This suggests Stoker's view that suffering is not something to undergo for the sake of purification of the soul; that indeed, it is a sickness that can damage the soul. Instead, it is something to avoid at all costs. While Dante and Sinclair see suffering as a natural process of the human experience, Zola and Stoker, by contrast, see it as anathema to it. The approach which Zola and Stoker take toward human suffering seems more satisfying than that of Dante and Sinclair. The idea of suffering as an undesirable condition empowers the individual, who does not stand for the idea that one must suffer in order to gain reward. However, like Dante and Sinclair, the views of Zola and Stoker are ultimately unsatisfying as well. While Zola is fiercely anti-deterministic when it comes to human suffering, and believes that one must fight so as not to endure agony in this life, his work also shows what happens to a person whose life lacks suffering altogether. For example, the two aristocratic families portrayed in the book, the Gregoires and Hennebreaus, live quite a luxurious lifestyle, as they own the mines in which the workers are employed. The two families have very little sympathy for the poor; that which they do have is largely hypocritical and used in order to enable to boast about what good people they are. Monsieur Hennebreau, for example, says: "When I think that in our pits these chaps could make as much as six francs a day, double what they earn nowadays! And they lived well, too, and developed a taste for luxuries... But is it really our fault?... We are very hard hit as well" (203). This is a striking contrast to the image of the poor miners struggling to pay off their creditors that Zola paints earlier in the book: "They [the Maheu family] had promised to pay it off a score of times, but could never manage to let him have his forty sous per fortnight" (96). Monsieur Hennebreau's avarice and lack of understanding of the plight of the miners stems from the fact that he has not truly suffered as his workers have; his idea of suffering is starkly different from that of his underpaid, starving employees. The despicable nature of Monsieur Hennebreau which results from his life of privilege suggests that perhaps Dante is right in his assertion that one must experience anguish before he can truly understand the world in which he lives. Stoker's view of suffering is unsatisfying for another reason: the results that occur when the characters in Dracula try to prevent suffering. Despite the numerous blood transfusions Lucy receives, despite the preventative measures taken by her doctors and fiancé to ward off her sickness, she still suffers greatly, and eventually, dies. This suggests that while human suffering is definitely something which individuals must avoid, they will still experience it, no matter how hard they try to evade it. It is true that at the end of the book, Van Helsing, Seward, Quincey Morris, and Mina and Jonathan Harker succeed in killing Dracula (the embodiment of their suffering) -- but it is essential to the story that others suffer before they can achieve the elminiation of suffering. Lucy Westenra dies in spite of the protection granted to her, and Mina states that, "To our bitter grief, with a smile and silence, he [Quincey Morris] died, a gallant gentleman" (485). It seems that while Stoker believes that suffering is an impurity and unnecessary, he later contradicts this belief, since it is clear that Quincey had to suffer the pains of death for the purpose of eliminating suffering altogether. On one hand, Stoker shows human torment as a completely abominable, and furthermore, needless condition, but shows that it is both necessary and inevitable with the deaths of Lucy Westenra and Quincey Morris. There are two views of human suffering that thinkers tend to espouse: either that of suffering as an inevitable (and perhaps required) part of the life cycle, as Dante Alighieri and Upton Sinclair suggest; or that of suffering as a loathsome process which humans must strive to prevent, a belief held by Émile Zola and Bram Stoker. Both views have their flaws: the former lends itself toward fatalism and inactivity; the latter negates the possibility that suffering could potentially be something beneficial. Both points of view are right, and wrong. Suffering is inevitable; it can be a way of purification, and a way to better understand others, but it is not something one should welcome nor crave. Suffering is an undesirable condition, but it is our trials which shape us; the complete absence of hardship in one's life is ultimately its own suffering. Furthermore, the "trial by fire" quality of suffering can motivate an individual to modify his life in such a way that he betters himself during his time on Earth, instead of simply idly hoping for a reward in heaven while perpetuating his own misery. While none of the authors I have examined have a truly satisfying view on human suffering, the different ways by which the characters react to their hardships (or lack thereof) have shown me that suffering is not something to shun nor embrace, but rather, something I should treat as a natural course of life -- something I should undergo, yet also learn from, just as I should do with any other life experience. Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans.: John Ciardi. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1982. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Zola, Émile. Germinal. London: Penguin Books, 1954. back to school projects home