The Great Divorce

Lewis’s inclusion of the real-life Scottish author and minister George MacDonald evokes Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Virgil, a real-life Roman poet, leads Dante through Hell and Purgatory. Despite this similarity in spiritual guide characters, however, the two texts are quite different both thematically and structurally. Dante’s work spends much more time in Hell and Purgatory than Lewis’s, is much more interested in placing real historical figures in one or the other destination, and portrays Hell and Heaven more in keeping with traditional religious art than Lewis does.

MacDonald makes a fitting guide for the narrator because of his authorial similarities to Lewis. Both men wrote extensively about religion in both fiction and nonfiction, and both made important contributions to fantasy literature. While Lewis is now the more famous of the pair, MacDonald influenced many famous writers, including his mentee, Lewis Carroll.

Because MacDonald lived in the 19th century, he has been in Heaven for some time (in earthly terms) when the narrator arrives in the Valley, and he is therefore able to speak as a mouthpiece for God. While the narration does not elevate him to a godlike status, his stances and explanations are the stances and explanations that the novel endorses. Some of the ideas he communicates are difficult for the narrator to accept, but that is part of the point of the book: Choosing Heaven is difficult, for it requires a person to set aside things about themselves they think are essential and irreplaceable. MacDonald does, however, suggest that many of the things he discusses with the narrator are difficult because of the narrator’s limited perspective as a human with no understanding of eternity. 

Each of the Ghosts has some fundamental flaw in their thinking, and Ikey’s is that he thinks human systems of governance can save humankind. He understands political and economic theory but fails to see that no human system can ever compensate for sinful human nature. In other words, because humans are (according to Christian doctrine) born sinful, their natures will always corrupt any institutions they construct. Some institutions and systems may lend themselves to corruption more than others, but none can ever solve the problem altogether.

Ikey fails to realize this and remains dedicated to the idea of fixing the Grey Town by introducing “commodities” to it, thereby increasing demand and drawing all its citizens from the enormous distances to which they have scattered themselves back to a centralized location. Gathered together, he supposes, they stand a better chance of defending themselves against “the night”—Ikey’s shadowy idea about the Purgatorial Grey Town turning into Hell at some unknown future point. He tries to gather apples from the Valley to bring to the Grey Town to enact this plan, not realizing its impossibility. The only way for him to enjoy the apples is to give up his plans for the Grey Town and choose to go forth into the Mountains. Although the reader does not see the resolution of his attempt, we are certain of its failure, not only because of the philosophical mistake in his thinking, but also because of the logistical impossibility of fitting a single apple from the Valley into the Grey Town; the narrator learns in Chapter 13 that “All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world” (138).