The biggest theme of The Great Divorce is salvation; more specifically, ensuring one’s immortal soul reaches Heaven and not Hell through the exercising correct moral choices in life and the practice of forgiving others and seeking forgiveness for your own sins. For Lewis, Heaven and Hell are not metaphoric or ideas, they are real places.
In the book, Lewis develops this by having other related themes that affect salvation like, vanity vs. pride, love, the value of ideologies, faith vs. skepticism, jealousy, anger, and forgiveness.
In the book, to enter the Heaven, ghosts are told that all they need to do is accept God and let go their earlier selfish interests. Lewis shows examples of people who are to attached to their pride, like the
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This allows Lewis, to make the point that we, too, have evidence of the consequences of good and bad choices, of Heaven and Hell, all around us all the time, too, and yet that doesn’t stop the effectiveness of skeptic arguments.
Jealousy and resentment are two of the biggest things to let go of to have salvation. In the book, ghosts find themselves jealous of the angels’ appearance, clothing, and status. They resent not being angels themselves, as they feel entitled to it. Jealous of how many people seem to love the angels, they resent not being so loved themselves.
Finally, forgiveness is an important theme in the book. At some point in every transition between ghost and angel, forgiveness is offered. The ghosts (in transition) refuse and instead hold the narrow-minded self-identifications, egoistic arrogance and obsessions are Lewis’ accusation of man himself. The ghosts in the book cannot abandon their senses of self, no matter how wrongly constructed.
For Lewis, all such refusals, are examples of wrong moral choices, choices with eternal consequences. Choose correctly, and you will go to Heaven. Choose poorly, by declining forgiveness and rejecting salvation, and the consequences are going to hell. Right is right, wrong is wrong and no amount of wishful thinking will make it