First, the narrator sees a Ghost speak to a solid person who used to be his employee. Most of the remainder of the novel involves interactions between the Ghosts and the solid Spirits. Soon, a group of bright, solid people (“Spirits”) approaches the bus passengers. Although no one immediately voices the suspicion, dialogue in subsequent chapters reveals that most of the passengers (whom Lewis calls “Ghosts”) assume they are in Heaven. Everything around them is enormously weighty and solid the very grass hurts to walk on. The bus passengers disembark and notice that they all appear translucent, but they gradually realize this is less because they themselves have changed and more because their surroundings have. Other passengers disagree, but they stop speculating when a bright light suddenly shines into the bus. A different man on the bus seems to believe the Grey Town is Purgatory, telling the narrator that as bad as it is, it will one day get worse when the long evening finally ends and night descends. When a gleamingly bright bus arrives, the narrator has to sit by a very talkative young man, who explains that he was sent to the Grey Town after his death by suicide. This study guide uses the 2015 HarperCollins paperback edition of the novel.Īt the start of Chapter 1, the novel’s unnamed narrator finds himself standing in a bus line in a drab, gray town. In addition to Blake’s poem, The Great Divorce evokes works of literature in which an everyman narrator embarks on a spiritual journey, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Unlike Blake, who expresses a dualistic belief that good and evil feed off each other in a symbiotic relationship, Lewis suggests that the separation of good and evil will be eternal in the afterlife, and that humans must sacrifice their sinful natures in order to enter God’s presence. The novel’s title references Romantic writer William Blake’s poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The great divorce book