The Great Divorce

“And just as the evening never advanced to night, so my walking had never brought me to the better parts of the town […] I never met anyone. But for the little crowd at the bus stop, the whole town seemed to be empty. I think that was why I attached myself to the queue.”

In Chapter 1, Lewis abruptly drops the narrator (and by extension the reader) into the Grey Town with no preamble about how he got there. Although the reader does not know it at the time, the narrator never meets anyone in his wanderings through the Grey Town because residents of the Grey Town opt to live far away from each other. Otherwise, they quarrel constantly. The long anticipation of a night that never arrives but always seems close evokes the sense of Purgatory.

“They won’t like it at all when we get there, and they’d really be much more comfortable at home.” 

On the bus to the Valley of the Shadow of Life, Ikey correctly predicts that many of the Ghosts will not enjoy the new scenery despite its beauty in comparison to the Grey Town. The Grey Town is where they feel comfortable, and, with only one exception, they choose that miserable comfort over the glorious risk of killing their sinful nature to enter Heaven.

“‘It will be dark presently,’ he mouthed.

‘You mean the evening is really going to turn into a night in the end?’

He nodded.”

Though none of the residents of the Grey Town have definitive proof that they are in Hell, Ikey’s statement to the narrator here indicates that he thinks they exist in a Purgatory that will one day turn into Hell.