66 pages • 2 hours read

The Great Divorce

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1945

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapter 9

Chapters 10-11

Chapters 12-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

The novel begins abruptly when an unnamed narrator finds himself in a long line of people in a dreary, gray town: “I seemed to be standing,” he narrates, “in a busy queue by the side of a long, mean street” (1). As he waits, some of the other people drift away from the line. Some argue, with a large, bullying man even resorting to physical violence against a smaller man. The narrator observes these abandoners happily, excited to get closer to the front.

When a gleaming bright bus driven by a similarly gleaming driver arrives, the narrator endures the selfish pushing and shoving of his fellow riders in order to get a spot. A “tousle-haired youth” takes the seat next to him and confides they are the only two on the bus who don’t fit in with the other riders’ “appalling lack of any intellectual life” (5). To the narrator’s dismay, the youth produces a manuscript he has written that he wants the narrator to read and critique; the narrator begins making an excuse about not having his spectacles but is saved from further comment when the riders excitedly realize the bus is taking off.

Chapter 1 Analysis

The novel’s opening lines disorient the reader in a way that mirrors the narrator’s own disorientation. By saying that he “seemed to be” standing in a line (1), the narrator creates the impression that he himself is not sure of the evidence of his own senses and does not fully understand the reality in which he finds himself. Readers are likely to feel the same way, as the remainder of the chapter does nothing to explain the line either to the narrator or to the reader, leaving us to wonder what the line is for, why the narrator is standing in it, why anyone else is there, and why some people drift away. The suddenness and uncertainty of the opening lines evokes the sensation of dreaming.

Much later in the novel, the narrator finds that he is in fact dreaming, but his sudden appearance in the line suggests another possibility, and one that seems much more likely until the novel’s closing chapters: death. As the reality of an afterlife comes into clearer focus in Chapters 2 and 3, the natural readerly assumption is that the narrator suddenly emerges into consciousness in a line in the Grey Town because he has just awoken in the afterlife after dying on Earth. The ambiguity as to whether the narrator is truly in line or not allows the reader to think that he is one of the novel’s many dead characters for the majority of the book.

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When the narrator gets on the bus, the tousle-haired youth who first sits by him has a manuscript and wants to present it to the narrator for a critique. The narrator shudders when he sees the youth pull out the manuscript and starts to make an excuse about needing his glasses before a distraction saves him. Famous writers often experience such requests, so the fact that the youth would think to ask the narrator for this favor hints that the narrator is probably a famous writer, just like Lewis. The narrator’s reaction—a “shudder” followed by muttered excuses about needing spectacles—provides one of the novel’s few moments of Lewis’s trademark sense of humor, plentiful in some of his work but less frequent in this more sober text.