'The Great Divorce" and "What Dreams May Come'
The Great Divorceáand What Dreams May Come offer two relatively different versions of the afterlife. While Matheson's version in Dreams seems to follow very closely the philosophy set out by H.H. Price, Lewis' Divorce does not seem to fit comfortably into either Price or David Hume's concepts of perception and personal identity. Though there are similarities between the two versions of the afterlife, the fundamental difference in the after-life as depicted in these two stories is that in Dreams Heaven is a retreat into our minds while in Divorce Heaven is letting go of our minds. In Dreams our state of mind creates Heaven while in Divorce our state of mind creates Hell.
In The Great Divorce our narrator takes a bus from the indistinguishable Grey Town we later learn is Hell to another place that we later learn is Heaven. On the bus he meets the Tousle-headed Poet, an apparent suicide, and Ikey, a salesman, of sorts. What is significant about these two characters is that even in death they demonstrate the character flaws that plagued their lives. For example, the Poet suffered in life from a belief that he was misunderstood and unappreciated (Lewis 8). He feels that same about having been sent to the Grey Town after his death. Ikey, on the other hand, spent his life catering to people's material needs and now finds himself out-of-sorts in a town where people can fill all their needs merely by thinking (Lewis 11-12). Both men, then, both unhappy in life are equally unhappy in death.
As the light grows in the bus, however, our narrator looks around and sees that all the people on the bus û all these dissatisfied quarrelsome people û "were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities, but of impossibilities" (Lewis 16). Yet, as the light grows, he catches sight of his own reflection, but his appearance is not revealed to the reader (Lewis 16). The significance of this mo...