YMMV / The Great Divorce

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • It's easy to see God as evil, when there's no logical reason for the creator to offer to take those Hell ghosts to Heaven he knows beforehand can't ever be saved. Rather, the arguing, the pain and bitterness the damned feel, appears more like the trip was all orchestrated to give the Bright Ones closure for those who wronged them in life.
  • The Bright Ones' own joyous dismissal of those who remain in hell can easily come off as simply cold and ruthless, and indeed the narrator is briefly given a justification for this mindset, but how well that justification actually works probably depends on how accepting the viewer is towards Christianity.
• Cry for the Devil: The description of Napoleon in Hell, stumbling around in a huge empty mansions desperately blaming his problems on everyone in his life but himself, can be quite a Tear Jerker.
  A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • In the beginning of the story, there's a bus, which drives damned from Hell to Heaven if they wish. The bus is operated by unnamed driver. Later, in Heaven, George McDonald notes that only God can go to Hell to save sinners.
  • Ikey manages to lift a heavenly apple and even carry it, while even the narrator can't lift a leaf. On rereading, one can see there are early hints that Ikey is better than many of the Ghosts: he mentions being actually friendly with "the chap with a telescope" in the town, while most other Ghosts quarrel with their nearest neighbors within the first twenty-four hours, as Ikey says himself. Moreover, while other Ghosts are purely concerned about themselves, Ikey takes the bus because he wants to improve the others' lives, even if it's twisted through his own negative impulses.
  • According to MacDonald, the possessive mother isn't beyond redemption, since her love for her son hasn't completely turned into selfishness. On Rewatch Bonus, one can see an additional hint of that: her first question about her son is a Mama Bear-like "He is here, of course?" Compare this to Robert's Wife's comment about her husband: "How he comes to be here... but that is your affair."
• Genius Bonus: Trajan is mentioned as a ghost the narrator might've heard made it into Heaven eventually. This is actually a famous piece of Catholic lore; that Pope Gregory the Great miraculously raised Trajan from the dead and converted him to Christianity. That's why Dante puts Trajan in Paradise rather than Limbo.
• Harsher in Hindsight: When discussing the ghost of the controlling mother the Narrator tells MacDonald he couldn't bear to talk to a grieving woman intellectually when he hasn't lost someone himself, and MacDonald says he shouldn't... yet. Sixteen years later, after losing the love of his life to cancer, he would indeed write A Grief Observed.
  "But could one dare—could one have the face—to go to a bereaved mother, in her misery—when one's not bereaved oneself? . . ."
  "No, no. Son, that's no office of yours. You're not a good enough man for that. When your own heart's been broken it will be time for you to think of talking."
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • While on the bus to heaven, one of the ghosts the narrator converses with nervously reveals that there is talk in hell that when the sun finally sets, "they" will come out.
  • The ending of the conversation between Sarah and Frank Smith, which ends with Frank's ghost being swallowed by the spirit of his own denial.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The Great Divorce can be seen as a modern(ish), less unsubtle counterpart to John Bunyan's classic The Pilgrim's Progress. Both works are allegories for the Christian faith where almost every character represents an ideology or a personal vice, and they both turn out to be dreams at the end. Lewis also wrote The Pilgrim's Regress, which was more blatantly inspired by Bunyan's work right down to the title.
  • This one is also a fairly obvious Spiritual Successor to The Divine Comedy. It's a dream-vision of a journey from Hell to Heaven via something not unlike Purgatory; Lewis appears as the everyman narrator of his own book; and he has a Spirit Advisor: George MacDonald represents a combination of both Virgil in Inferno and Purgatorio, and Beatrice in Paradiso (when Lewis first meets George MacDonald, he claims that reading George MacDonald's books as a teenager was for him 'like Dante's first sight of Beatrice'). Sarah Smith is always portrayed in very Beatrice-like terms, and her failed reunion with her husband is a portrayal of how Beatrice's reunion with Dante could have gone horribly wrong if Dante hadn't had the humility to accept her rebukes, and accept happiness without needing to be right.
• Values Dissonance:
  • May be unintended, but the overly materialistic (or mercantile) ghost is named "Ikey"— a common and not entirely kindly nickname for a Jewish man.
  • As with most of Lewis's work, this is an unapologetic Author Tract. As such, if you believe in Christianity, this is a heartwarming account of God's unconditional love and how even the worst person can find salvation. If you're not a Christian, then the book will likely come off very differently.
• Wangst:
  • Pretty much endemic to the residents of Hell because it's the (main) reason why so many Ghosts get stuck there—they can't see past their own egos long enough to admit that they even need help, much less that it would take God to transform them in any eternally meaningful or beneficial manner.
  • The Tousle-Headed Poet is a particularly egregious example.