They promise as the ghosts travel onward and upward that they will become more solid and thus feel less and less discomfort. Shining figures, men and women whom they have known on Earth, come to meet them and to urge them to repent and walk into Heaven proper. Although the country they disembark into is the most beautiful they have ever seen, every feature of the landscape, including streams of water and blades of grass, is unyieldingly solid compared to themselves: It causes them immense pain to walk on the grass, whose blades pierce their shadowy feet, and even a single leaf is far too heavy for any to lift. When it reaches its destination the passengers on the bus – including the narrator – are gradually revealed to be ghosts. The ascending bus breaks out of the rain clouds into a clear, pre-dawn sky, and as it rises its occupants' bodies change from being normal and solid into being transparent, faint, and vapor-like. Once the few remaining passengers have boarded, the bus flies upward, off the pavement into the grey, rainy sky. When it arrives, the driver is an angel who shields his face from the passengers. As they await the bus's arrival, many of them quit the line in disgust before the bus pulls up. He waits in line for the bus and listens to the arguments between his fellow passengers.

He eventually finds a bus stop for those who desire an excursion to some other place (the destination later turns out to be the foothills of Heaven). The narrator inexplicably finds himself in a grim and joyless city, the 'grey town', where it rains continuously, even indoors, which is either Hell or Purgatory depending on whether or not one stays there. George MacDonald, whom Lewis utilizes as a character in the story, Dante, Prudentius and Jeremy Taylor are alluded to in the text of chapter 9. Augustine, Dante Aligheri, John Milton, John Bunyan, Emanuel Swedenborg and Lewis Carroll, as well as an American science fiction author whose name Lewis had forgotten but whom he mentions in his preface ( Hall, Charles F, The Man Who Lived Backwards ). Lewis's diverse sources for this work include the works of St. The Great Divorce was first printed as a serial in an Anglican newspaper called The Guardian in 19 and soon thereafter in book form.

The title refers to William Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The working title was Who Goes Home? but the final name was changed at the publisher's insistence. Lewis, published in 1945, based on a theological dream vision of his in which he reflects on the Christian conceptions of Heaven and Hell. The Great Divorce is a novel by the British author C.

Cs lewis science fiction