ABSTRACT
The contemporary fascination with hell centers on a desire to pinpoint those permanent and prospective hell-dwellers. In Beckford's Vathek, there is a recognizable heaven and a recognizable hell. Beckford's depictions of hell and heaven provide plural ways to read the role of community in a seeming afterlife. Heaven and hell present the upper and lower scaffolds of our world, respectively: heaven reserved for the good, hell for the bad. In Beckford's Eblis, something is certainly askew, something that discomposes a recognition of hell, and simultaneously offers diversity to the telling of hell, something that is as much for the audience as it is for his heroes. Though different from contemporary associations of hell, Eblis in Vathek is both a person and a place, which importantly confuses understandings of not only proper nouns but also the cohabitation of place within a larger self.
