Just Try to Be a Good Person

C.S. Lewis

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 June 2014.

I like it a lot. All of it. Having Stan in Hell works on so many levels, and Will's vision of his torment before committing murder would account for years of Will shutting down, giving up on redeeming Arthur through the American Dream, and viewing himself as damned.

And paradoxically, understanding the reality of Hell could move him to believe in the reality of Heaven.

Also, in a world that has watered down Catholicism to "just try to be a good person," having the "saintly" Lena in Purgatory--not in the Heaven where all mothers go by virtue of being mothers-- fortifies the morality play aspect of the story.

I also love that both lend credence to the glowing lodestone vision of The American Dream!

In the midst of all this, however, Heaven is still much bigger than Hell.  In The Great Divorce, a tour guide on the outskirts of Heaven shows a tourist on his way from Purgatory and Hell that the whole vastness of the Hell he had experienced was only the size of a hole left behind from plucking a blade of grass in Heaven.

That doesn't minimize Hell...it just suggests the enormity of Heaven.