The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Week 2: Chapter 1 — The Grey Town
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The story opens not with fire and brimstone but with something far more familiar — a drizzly, quarrelsome, endlessly spreading grey city — and the effect is quietly devastating.
Discussion Questions
7 questions1.Lewis's Hell is not a place of dramatic torment but a grey, perpetually twilight town where the inhabitants keep moving further and further apart because they cannot get along with their neighbors. What does this image suggest about the nature of sin and selfishness?
2.The narrator discovers that the Grey Town has been spreading for eons and yet is nearly empty at its center — people keep quarreling and moving to the outskirts. Lewis says the entire history of the world would fit into one small crack in the ground of Heaven. What does this scale-reversal do to your sense of what is 'real' and what is 'small'?
3.The narrator notices that in the Grey Town it is always nearly night — a perpetual drizzly dusk. Why do you think Lewis chose perpetual twilight rather than total darkness as his image for Hell? What does unfinished, almost-dark suggest about the nature of spiritual lostness?
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