Novel: The Great Divorce

Overview
C. S. Lewis’s 1945 novella presents a dream-journey from a drab, quarrelsome city to the bright outskirts of Heaven, using encounters along the way to dramatize the soul’s freedom to choose joy or cling to self. Its title stakes a claim against any “marriage” of Heaven and Hell, insisting on a decisive separation between light and darkness. The narrator, an observer modeled on Lewis, records what he sees and hears, then wakes at dawn, leaving readers with a sharpened sense that eternal destinies crystallize through ordinary choices of love, truth, and surrender.

Premise and Setting
The narrator finds himself at a bus stop in a colorless “grey town” where it is always twilight and always drizzling. People bicker, drift apart, and can conjure new houses by imagining them, yet nothing satisfies. A fantastical bus arrives and carries whoever wishes upward and outward into a green country on the edge of Heaven. There, the travelers discover they are ghostlike, while the grass, trees, and mountains are painfully solid. They are met by radiant “Spirits” who invite them to go further up and further in, if they will drop the habits and fixations that make them insubstantial.

Encounters on the Foothills of Heaven
One by one, the visiting ghosts reveal why they cannot yet endure Reality. A swaggering “Big Man” balks at accepting forgiveness from Len, the very man who murdered him and has since repented; pride makes gift-love intolerable. An urbane bishop prefers perpetual “open-minded” discussion to adoration; he reduces faith to cleverness and will return to organize a theological circle in Hell. An artist, once gifted, clings to fame and technique instead of the Beauty that art sought; he will not forget himself to behold the real landscape.

A mother, Pam, demands her dead son back on her terms; grief has hardened into possessive love that refuses to love God first. A grumbling woman has almost become only a grumble; the possibility remains that she could still be a person, if she lets joy interrupt her complaint. A hardened tourist dismisses both Heaven and Hell as swindles and resolves to be “nobody’s fool,” choosing cynicism over wonder.

In one of the most striking scenes, a ghost plagued by a whispering red lizard of lust consents to an angel’s painful offer to kill it. The lizard dies and is transformed into a great silver stallion; the ghost becomes solid and rides joyfully up the mountains. By contrast, a pitiful dwarf, chained to a preening Tragedian who mouths his lines for him, meets a gracious woman (Sarah Smith) who loves him with clear-eyed, selfless joy. He chooses the theatrical self over the real self and dwindles into the chain he will not drop.

Guide and Vision
The narrator is tutored by the spirit of George MacDonald, who explains that Hell is the ultimate sulk, its doors locked from the inside. Time there is slippery; the grey town could be on the verge of dawn or already in endless night, and in the end all of Hell will be smaller than a pebble in the “real world.” Heaven is more real than earth, more solid and alive, and joy is the atmosphere of its freedom.

Ending and Meaning
Almost all the visitors turn back, preferring self to surrender. The lesson is not that Heaven is hard but that letting go of cherished sins feels hard until one consents. The narrator, urged to look higher, awakens to a church bell and morning light. The dream’s urgency lingers: reality, joy, and love are offered; the “great divorce” is finally the soul’s choice to either keep hell within or step into the solid country where every blade of grass sings.