The Great Divorce: Difference between revisions
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The title is a reference to [[William Blake]]'s ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''. Lewis said in his introduction that Blake wrote of the marriage of Heaven and Hell; he was writing of their divorce.
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* [[A Hell of a Time]]: As one character points out, the Grey Town doesn't contain the expected sights associated with Hell: devils with pitchforks, sinners being tortured on flaming racks, etc. But at best, it's a depressing, rainy place where constant squabbling causes residents to spread out from everyone else and become [[The Aloner]]. Also, it's hinted that things are [[It Got Worse|about to get much worse]].
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* [[Madness Mantra]] - "It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the English. It was the fault of the Russians."
* [[The Masochism Tango]] - A husband and wife who leave the line for the bus quarreling. It is clear that they will go on trashing each other forever.
* [[Mundane Afterlife]] - Hell is just a rainy twilit town that gives new meaning to "urban sprawl". This is even [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] by some who remark that the one draw of
* [[My Beloved Smother]] - One of the more heart-wrenching conversations is on this theme.
* [[Our Ghosts Are Different]] - We only see the Ghosts who decide to visit Heaven, but there's some discussion about Ghosts who take similar visits back to Earth.
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* [[Spirit Advisor]] - Every visitor from Hell gets one; though the Heavenly Beings are all fully visible to one another, the Hellish ones can only perceive depending on certain circumstances.
* [[The Treachery of Images]]: The blessed former apostate finally gives up on trying to reason with his damned apostate friend not very long after the damned soul has gone so far off the deep end in his pseudo-intellectual diatribe that he ends up complaining about how the blessed man is talking "as if there some hard, fixed reality where things are, so to speak, 'there'."
* [[Time Stands Still]]: Lewis had the idea for the story from a half-remembered story about a world frozen in time. Nothing the spirits do can effect any real
* [[Wanting Is Better Than Having]]: One ghosts argues this: It's better to travel hopefully than to arrive. The Bright One returns that if you knew that to be true, you could not travel in hope, because how can you hope to reach an inferior destination?
* [[Was Once a Man]]: Many of the Hellish spirits are so bitter that there's very little left of them.
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