The Great Divorce

Although the Grey Town seems like a straightforward symbol, it grows more complicated as the book goes on. While it can be considered Hell, it is not Hell for everyone there. MacDonald explains to the narrator that for those who journey to the Valley and accept the offer of Heaven, the Grey Town appears retroactively to be and to always have been Purgatory. To those who reject Heaven, however, the Grey Town will appear to be and always have been Hell.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide a brief portrait of the Grey Town’s depressing atmosphere. While no one there experiences the sensation of unmet material needs, they do experience increasing isolation of their own doing. They frequently quarrel with each other, which leads to everyone there electing to move progressively further and further away from their neighbors. Those who have been there for centuries live so far away that it would take them lightyears to make the journey to the bus stop. This symbolically illustrates Lewis’s contention that Hell is “a state of mind” (70)—specifically, a self-attachment that prevents one from accepting God’s presence or anything that flows from it, including true human connection.

The talking lizard appears only briefly in the novel, but its presence is part of a pivotal moment. It sits on a Ghost’s shoulder, whispering sinful suggestions in his ear. His presence is much like the common cartoonish idea of the warring angels and demons that sit on a person’s shoulders, prodding them in opposite directions. Though no one in the scene explicitly calls the lizard a demon, he fulfills a demonic presence by tempting the man to continue living in sin. His red coloring and the description of his tail “twitching like a whip” further associate the lizard with demonic forces (106).

The Ghost with the shoulder lizard has no angelic animal sitting on the opposite shoulder, but an Angel does appear to him and offers to kill the lizard. Though the lizard puts up a fight, it is the Ghost who has the last word, and he finally gives his consent for the Angel to kill the beast. After the Angel does so, the lizard rises again as a magnificent stallion, showing that even the basest people and things can be redeemed; sins are merely perversions of what is good rather than evils in their own right.

Lewis explicitly explains the chessboard’s symbolic meaning within the text. The symbol is composed of many elements. Firstly, the chessboard itself sits on a silver table that Lewis labels as “Time.” Surrounding the chessboard are “a great assembly of gigantic forms” and they watch “little figures like chessmen who [go] to and fro doing this and that” (143). The chessmen and their watchers are two versions of the same person: “These chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world,” while “those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women” (143).

The image frightens the narrator, who thinks that what he sees indicates that free will is a myth, that choices that feel real and urgent to humans are really only “the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago” (144). MacDonald reframes this question, replying, “Or might ye not as well say, anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things?” (144). Ultimately, however, MacDonald holds that neither of these ways of expressing the symbol’s meaning are completely accurate, for they both rely on understanding human choices in the context of time, whereas the more accurate way to understand free will is through the lens of eternity.