The Great Divorce

In Chapter 2, the young man goes on to rehearse his own dispiriting history. To explain the mediocrity of his life, he blames world systems—first capitalism, but then also communism when the mixed results of the world’s communist revolutions disappointed him. When a romantic heartbreak acted as the final straw in his string of disappointments, he jumped under a train and subsequently found himself in the Grey Town. He is sure that he will finally be appreciated in the place to which the bus is taking them.

When a quarrel breaks out on the bus, the resulting mayhem brings the narrator a new seat companion whom another passenger refers to as “Ikey.” The Grey Town’s occupants, Ikey says, are in a continual state of moving farther and farther away from each other. They can conjure new habitations for themselves simply by imagining them, so when they quarrel with each other, they simply imagine new housing farther away from their antagonists. Those who have been there for centuries—including some well-known names like Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Henry the Fifth—live so far away from the bus stop that it would take them lightyears to reach it if they wanted to make the trip.

Ikey has an improvement plan for the Grey Town: He thinks that if he can introduce “commodities”—real, material goods different than the ones the residents conjure by imagining—everyone will want them. This demand will draw everyone back to the city center—a desirable outcome because there is “safety in numbers” (14). The frightening eventuality he wants to gather protection against is that “It will be dark presently” (15). In other words, the long evening will one day “turn into a night” (15). When the narrator asks how Ikey’s scheme would address the quarrelling problem, Ikey says that the residents could form a police force.

Another passenger, one the narrator describes as “fat,” objects to Ikey’s plans and dismisses the idea that the Grey Town’s evening will one day turn to night, calling such thoughts “primitive superstitions” (16). The bully from the queue joins in, telling Ikey to shut up. The passengers forget their arguing, however, when a bright light suddenly fills the bus, exposing everyone’s faces as extraordinarily “distorted and faded” (17).