The+Great+Divorce

This page is for material on The Great Divorce. (TGD) A mention of The Great Divorce appears in the context of the idea of Persona. //In TGD what one finds is a whole host of characters who have either surrendered their false selfs, or are tenaciously holding on to them. The contrast between the Bright People of Heaven's foothills, and the Ghosts who arrive in those foothills from the Grey Town whence they came, couldn't be more stark. As theological fiction the novel effectively uses drama to point out the many ways in which human beings resist redemption. Self-justification is often involved, as is self-pity, self-centeredness, and selfishness. The common thread to all these attitudes is, of course, the self, or more exactly, the false self, the self in its fallen state.

Lewis presents us with a cast of characters who run the gamut from those who suffer from a sense of their own importance, whether because of artistic or intellectual, or even worse, "spritual" gifts (the artist, the young "unappreciated" suicide who had written an unpublished manuscript, the bishop for whom the spiritual "journey" inordinately becomes more important than arriving) to those who are unable, through self-righteouness, to forgive (the foreman who meets his former underling, who happened to have been a murderer), to those who cannot relinquish control of the lives of others (the nagging wife who finally goes up in a puff of smoke, the mother of Michael whose only aim is to be reunited with the son she lost early in his life, even if that meant spending eternity in Hell with him, and of course, the Dwarf/Tragedian.)

Ultimately, what all these people have in common is an unwillingness to surrender themselves, or more accurately, to die to their false selves. In contrast to them all, Lewis presents the man with an addiction to lust as represented by a lizard upon his shoulder. When this lustful Ghost finally consents to having the lizard slain by the angel both he and his lustful passions become tranformed into new creatures.//