Daniel Kuruvilla
Prof. Robertson
11/06/2015
Theo 101-02
The Great Divorce In the book The Great Divorce, the Christian author C.S. Lewis writes about his interpretation and uses his imagination to paint an image of his heaven and hell. Throughout this immensely visual book, Lewis imagines hell to be a vast city with no “good part” of the city. In the first chapter, the unnamed narrator says he walks for miles and miles throughout the grey, rainy and gloomy city until he finds a bus station with a long line. In this long line, he observes that the people are bickering and fighting. He intuitively standing in the very long line, while not knowing the destination of the bus. In the opening scene, the narrator paints an image of the town, “I only…show more content… I never met anyone.” (page 1). The narrator meets people in the line and befriends them, asking if “wouldn’t mind (his) tacking on to (them)” (page 4) and soon the bus is flying, “Hullo! We’ve left the ground.” As the narrator continues his journey on the magic flying bus, he starts talking to his companion in the seat next to him. The man is intelligent looking and the narrator strikes up a conversation, “It seems the deuce of a town, and that what I can’t understand. The parts of it I saw were so empty. Was there once a much larger population?” This I where we get a piece of knowledge about the city that is hell. The man goes on to tell about how everyone is constantly arguing and can never settle or have neighbors. The city goes on and on because individuals keep fighting, and moving further from each other. Due to this, the cities bounds never stop being redrawn, as people are always moving away. These are just examples of how Lewis paints his image of hell in his book The Great Divorce. The bus finally goes over a cliff and lands in Heaven. Lewis paints a gorgeous picturesque scene, “at last the top of the cliff becam visible like a thin line
