Book Analysis: The Great Divorce

As famous author, C.S. Lewis once said in his novel Mere Christianity, “every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.” Humans always have a decision that has to be made, regardless how minor or severe the situation. In C.S. Lewis’s novel The Great Divorce, the characters become ghosts traveling through heaven and hell and are faced with the decision on where they will spend eternity. When readers go through Lewis’s novel, some might ask the question, why do the ghosts refuse to stay in heaven and choose to go to hell? When analyzing the novel on the surface, this question can ponder a reader with confusion. But the way to answer this

Michael Raiger analysis titled “The Place of the Self in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce,” looks at human identity and where sin is intertwined within it. The ghosts within The Great Divorce were living in different forms of sin, insecurity, greed, pride, or violence, which is what brought them to the decision on whether to go to heaven and hell and because of their sinful nature, they chose the path of sin, rather than the path of redemption. Gavin Ortlund touches on the sinful nature of man “On the Fall of Angels and the Falleness of Nature: An Evangelical Hypothesis Regarding Natural Evil” when concluding that the emotions of man are twisted and unreliable. He uses a quotation by Anne Dillard which states, “All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed.” In other words, the emotions of man are sick and twisted. This emphasis is important because of the fallen nature of man because of his sin and is shown repetitively in The Great Divorce. The character known as The Big Man was a very violent and deceitful character who made many mistakes, not only on earth, but on the bus on his way to heaven. He acted out of emotions and it can be determined that he also acted out of emotion when deciding to go back to hell. The sin that is in human nature has corrupted the nature to the core, and Orthlund and Raiger show the importance of understanding the nature of