The Great Divorce characters

Appears from the start

An unnamed Englishman who finds himself in a bleak, nearly empty town and joins a quarrelsome queue for a bus. He watches more than he argues, and the journey he takes becomes a guided inquiry into why people resist joy even when it is offered to them.

First appears in chapter 2

A fellow passenger who explains the grey town's strange geography to the narrator. He considers himself practical and enterprising, and imagines that the town's endless expansion can be turned to his advantage.

First appears in chapter 4

A burly ghost who meets a radiant spirit he knew in earthly life. He is indignant that grace could admit people he judges worse than himself, and insists on receiving what he calls his rights rather than accepting mercy on equal terms with them.

First appears in chapter 4

A bright spirit who comes to welcome the Big Ghost. During his mortal life Len committed a grave crime, but he now speaks without excuses and tries to persuade his former acquaintance that forgiveness, not comparative respectability, is the way into the mountains.

First appears in chapter 5

A transparent churchman who treats doubt as sophistication and prefers an open-ended exchange of ideas to committing himself to truth. He regards his distance from belief as intellectual honesty, even when an old friend invites him to leave abstraction behind and encounter reality directly.

First appears in chapter 5

A bright spirit who once studied and debated theology with the Episcopal Ghost. Dick warmly invites his old friend toward the mountains, answering evasions with the claim that the questions they once discussed have real answers that can now be known.

First appears in chapter 9

The Scottish writer whom the narrator admired on Earth and who becomes his guide in the solid country. MacDonald explains that the visitors are free to remain, but that doing so requires surrendering the cherished grievance, appetite, fear, or self-image that keeps each one insubstantial.

First appears in chapter 11

A diminished ghost tormented by a red lizard perched on his shoulder and whispering incessantly to him. He longs to be rid of it but fears that killing the creature will destroy something essential in himself.

First appears in chapter 11

A flaming, formidable spirit who offers to silence the red lizard permanently. He will not act without the ghost's consent, and patiently cuts through every delay and excuse until the ghost must make a genuine choice.

Also known as Sarah Smith of Golders Green

First appears in chapter 12

A glorious woman whose earthly life appeared ordinary but whose unpossessive kindness reached people and animals around her. In Heaven the scale of that freely given love is visible, and she approaches a ghost from her former life with compassion that does not submit to emotional coercion.

First appears in chapter 12

A small ghost associated with an outsized theatrical figure that performs his self-pity. He encounters Sarah Smith, his wife in mortal life, and tries to recover power over her through accusation and misery rather than accept the love she offers without conditions.

First appears in chapter 13

A mother whose love for her dead son, Michael, has contracted into a demand that nothing matter except reunion with him. A bright spirit urges her first to learn to want God for God's own sake, but she treats even Heaven as merely a means of getting Michael back.