What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1945 afterlife allegory featuring a bus journey from Hell?
Answer
The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis’s 1945 afterlife allegory featuring a bus journey from Hell is The Great Divorce.
The book follows a narrator who travels by bus from a bleak version of Hell to the outskirts of Heaven. There, the passengers encounter bright spiritual beings and must confront the choices, desires, and self-deceptions that keep them from accepting joy.
Lewis used the framework partly to respond to ideas about the relationship between Heaven and Hell. The title echoes William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, while Lewis’s work argues for a decisive contrast rather than a blending of the two states.
The Great Divorce is fiction, not a literal travel account or a conventional novel of adventure. Its episodic conversations make it an allegory, and the book is often read alongside Lewis’s other works of Christian imagination.