"The Great Divorce" & "What Dreams May Come" Th

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). Bot

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to show the Narrator's face on the bus because whether he has a face of possibility or impossibility will depend on how he acts in his life after having the dream. In this way, Divorce suggests the importance of our minds that is central to Dreams. In Dreams Chris believes that he is dreaming his death. But here, too, the dream is real. He begs to be released from "this black, unending nightmare" and feels anger at being ignored. In this way he is like the ghosts in Divorce who need to still be recognized as the people they were on Earth. In both stories, however, people must want to seek Heaven before they can even really know it's there. In Divorce, for example, the people must get on the bus. In Dreams, on the other hand, Chris must call for help before Buddy can reach him and help him into Heaven. Interestingly enough, however, the Heaven in dreams bears some similarities to Divorce's Hell/Purgatory. In the Heaven in Dreams people can create with their minds whatever they need (Matheson 17), just as could the people in Divorce's Hell. But in both cases the people themselves actually need for nothing if they can just see that. H.H. Price talks of an "imagy" world in his essay "Survival and the Idea of 'Another Worl
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Grey Town, I4vi Hume, Dreams Chris, Nonetheless Hume's, World' Price, Similarly Bishop, Divorce Smythies, Sydney Coale, Summerland Price, Earth Lewis, personal identity, sequence perceptions, jr smythies, mind ed jr, york humanities press, accept heaven, brain mind, hume's philosophy, mind modern, smythies york humanities, price's concept, jr smythies york, concepts nature, ed jr smythies, modern concepts,
Approximate Word count = 2380
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)