The Great Divorce: Chapter 3
Summary
The bus climbs over a cliff and travels across “a level, grassy country through which there ran a wide river” where it lands. All the passengers push and shove to get out.
Lewis leaves the bus where “the light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise”. He has the sense of “being in a larger space…which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair”. This gives him a feeling both of freedom, but also of exposure to possible danger.
Looking at his fellow-passengers, Jack sees them as almost transparent. The “grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed”. At this point he realizes that “the men were as they always had been” and that “it was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison”. He tries to pluck a daisy and fails, it being “heavier than a sack of coal”. One ghost runs back into the bus, screaming “I don’t like it!”.
The Big Man asks the Driver when they’ve got to go back, but he replies that they can stay as long as they please. One of the quieter and more respectable ghosts comments to Lewis that personally he left the Grey Town to get away from this riff-raff!
Our protagonist looks around and sees some great mountains with “cities perched on inaccessible summits”. In the same way that the Grey Town seemed to be frozen in time, here the light does not change, with “the promise or the threat of sunrise”.
He then sees “bright” people coming to meet them, whose “strong feet sank into the wet turf”. Some of these people are naked, others robed, but it seemed to make very little difference, “the naked ones did not seem less adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh“. Although some had beards, they all seemed ageless. Two more ghosts scream and hide in the bus. The remaining phantoms huddle close together.
Questions
Q1. How is this new land described? What do you think is the significance of these descriptions?
Q2. What does Lewis come to realize about himself and the other passengers?
Q3. What does the Bus Driver say about their stay in this new land?
Q4. What annoyed the Respectable Ghost?
Q5. How are the “bright” people described? What do you think is the significance of this?
Q6. Why do some of the phantoms hide in the bus?