The Great Divorce

The Great Divorce is a work of Christian fiction by C. S. Lewis. The working title was Who Goes Home? but the name (a response to William Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) was changed at the publisher's insistance. In Lewis' opinion, such a marriage was impossible.

The Great Divorce was first printed as a serial in a religious publication called The Guardian (not connected in any way to the British newspaper of the same name, which was then called the Manchester Guardian). The first chapter was printed in the November 10, 1944 issue, and continued through the April 13, 1945 issue, under the title Who Goes Home? or The Grand Divorce. The Great Divorce was printed in book form soon after.

In The Great Divorce, the narrator dreams that he is in a grim and gloomy town (a depiction of Hell, or purgatory for those leave it). He finds a bus for people who wish to see Heaven, gets on, and converses with some of the other people on the bus. The bus eventually reaches paradise, and the people on the bus (including the narrator) realise that they are ghosts, and every feature of the landscape (including drops of water and blades of grass) is unbearably solid compared to themselves, and causes them immense pain.

Shining people come to meet those from the town, and try to persuade them to repent and enter Heaven proper. Almost all of the ghosts refuse, giving various reasons and excuses. None of the ghosts realise that they have been in Hell. Much of the profit of the book lies in the recognition it awakes of the plausibility and familiarity, along with the thinness and self-deception, of the excuses that the ghosts refuse to abandon when to do so would bring them to reality and joy.

The narrator is met by George MacDonald. MacDonald explains that it is possible for a soul to remain in Heaven having been in the town; for such souls, their time in the town has been purgatory, and the goodness of Heaven works backwards into their time in the town. Conversely, the evil of Hell works backwards so that if a soul remains in the town, their time on Earth is turned to badness. According to MacDonald, Heaven and Hell cannot coexist in a single soul, and while it is possible to leave Hell and enter Heaven, doing so implies turning away (repentance).

Although this is not one of the better-known of Lewis' works, many perceptive readers consider it one of his finest.

Literary Influences

Lewis consciously draws elements of the plot from Dante's The Divine Comedy, comparing his meeting with MacDonald to "the first sight of Beatrice." He also credits a "scientifiction" (science fiction) story of unknown title and authorship with the idea for an "extrasolid" world. Where the original work used it to embody an unchangeable past, Lewis uses it to show the permanence and strength of the divine world compared to earth or Hell. He also credits the idea that Hell exists within Heaven but is "smaller than one atom" of it to his scientifiction readings; travel by shrinking or enlargement is a common theme in speculative fiction, and the narrator alludes to its presence in Alice in Wonderland.